


Imagine Something Of your Very Own

by MooseFeels



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Depression, Disordered Eating, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, More tags coming later, Multi, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sleeplessness, Slow Burn, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:24:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 32
Words: 24,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5549042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life during wartime, Rey and Finn and Poe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Poe can’t sleep.

It’s not that he can’t sleep or that he can’t...that he’s not  _ tired _ . He is tired; he’s so tired he has that tight kind of headache across his temples that makes his eyes throb and he can’t quite make words work the right way, can’t talk, can’t really think. It’s not quite as bad as it was when there was that awful series of raids, when every night he was out with the squadron, shooting tie-fighters out of the sky every four hours like clockwork for a week.

It’s not quite that bad, but Poe’s limit for not sleeping is three days and he’s approaching the third rapidly.

He sits in his bunk and runs his hands through his hair and resists it. Resists sleeping.

He did the bombing run against the starkiller base- went well. Went  _ really  _ well. Came back here, greeted General Organa with the good news, took a shower, and when he was out, Finn was back but not conscious and Rey was gone.

And he’s tired, but he can’t sleep for the nightmares. 

It hurt, when Ren reached in and Took. 

When Poe was fourteen, he was repairing a lower engine on an x-wing. Something turned on, something activated, something- anyway, he almost lost three fingers to it and it was a long, terrible walk to the medic to get it looked at and taken care of. He still has the long, horizontal scar over his bottom knuckles on his left hand, and it aches a little if he spends too much time in the cockpit.

The pain of that never kept him awake like this does though. 

Ripping. Tearing.

Deep, deep inside. 

He scrubs his hand over his face. Throws his legs over his bunk and hops down.

From a corner in his quarters, he hears BB-8 whirr to alertness, to action. She sings out a few beeps, inquisitive and worried.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just gonna go for a run. I’m fine, BB.”

He’s not gonna tell her that he’s afraid to sleep for what his memory will bring him; she’s  _ little _ and he wouldn’t put that on her. Droids have personalities, and while General Organa’s Threepio seems to be about forty and always has been, BB-8 is...she’s  _ small _ . And Poe can’t wish horror on her. 

He tugs on his boots and jogs out, into the night.

The air is cool over his skin and the stars are out; bright and clear. The asteroid field dots the sky oddly, leaving it speckled like the coat of an animal hiding out in the woods. 

Poe jogs a few meters and then slows to a brisk walk.

He doesn’t even realize he’s heading toward the medical bay until he gets there, and when he gets there, he just stands in front of the doors.

He walks into the building, and it’s empty but for Finn, who lays in a bed, asleep.

The doctors said good things, about Finn recovering. The marks from the lightsaber, from Ren, they’ll leave a scar, but he’ll heal and he’ll  _ live _ . 

Poe sits down, beside the bed. He reaches out and takes his hand. 

He saw Rey for a hot minute before she disappeared onto that bucket of bolts that she and Finn flew in on. She seemed...intense. Angry. But she also seemed to care about Finn and honestly, Poe’s got room to like pretty much anyone who likes Finn.

Poe lets the weight of Finn’s hand in his own ground him, like the feeling of his books on the floor and the shape of his clothes on his shoulders place him in the world, on D’Qar, in the base,  _ here _ .

He tries to let  _ here _ flood his senses, and he tries to let it relax him toward sleep.

Poe prays, in an abstract sense to nothing in particular, that he doesn’t have to remember tonight.


	2. Chapter 2

When Finn wakes up, Poe’s there.

Finn has a sharp memory. Clear and bright and total. Finn remembers data- for his whole life, every name he knew was either accompanied by a title- Captain or Supreme Leader or Emperor or  _ Darth _ (but that last one always in hushed, worried tones, in a certain kind of awe)- or was a string of letters and numbers. He didn’t make it through to officer training- he was never meant to be a specialist- but he did spend all the time memorizing manuals from front to back, taking blasters apart and reassembling them blind- Finn remembers data. Finn remembers raw information.

Even if he didn’t have that kind of memory, Finn’d know Poe pretty much anywhere, despite how brief their contact has been so far. Poe leaves a kind of... _ Poe-shaped hole _ whenever he leaves. Maybe it’s the  _ facefulness _ of Poe- he’s probably the first person Finn’s ever met who wasn’t faceless or hidden under layers of linen or plasteel or sneering. Poe’s unmistakable.

He’s sitting, slumped, in a chair next to his cot. His hair is messy and greasy, like he hasn’t washed in a few days. There are heavy bags under his eyes, dark and rough. He’s wearing half of a flightsuit, the sleeves tied around his waist, the bottom provided pants. He’s wearing a white undershirt, oil and grease-stained with stains on his armpits. He’s got a few days of stubble over his face and jaw. Every so often, he’ll twitch a little, a rogue movement over his face or through his fingers.

Poe’s right hand is entangled in his own.

Finn sits up, or he tries to, but a  _ shooting  _ pain through his back makes him cry out. 

“Whoah there,” Poe says next to him, his hands suddenly there, suddenly supporting and warm and  _ guiding _ . Easing him upward gently, preventing him from wrenching the muscle.

“We don’t have bacta,” he says. “The tanks- the fluid- we lost the ones we had on old bases because of being on the run. They used a few bandages though, and that helped but you’re still  _ healing _ .”

Poe’s voice is sleep heavy and cracking, kind of husky and deep. 

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” he says. “Sorry- I just- I wanted to sit up- how long have I been out?” Finn feels cool panic wash over him. “ _ Is Rey okay?” _

“Rey’s  _ fine _ , buddy,” Poe answers. He looks at him with tired eyes but also in a warm, safe kind of way. There’s not that crackling quality that’s usually there, but instead a kind of steady energy, a kind of warm fire. “She saved your ass, brought you back, and then headed out to find Skywalker. She needs training and he’d be a great asset to the Resistance.”

Finn sighs a breath he didn’t know he was holding; relief following the panic like a balm. 

He really  _ looks _ at Poe for a moment, at the weariness over him. “Are  _ you _ okay?”

Poe smiles for a moment before he shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he answers. “Pilot’s nerves; I don’t sleep too well. Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t think that’s real, but okay,” Finn answers. He lets his hand drift to his ribs, which  _ ache _ fiercely. 

“Here,” Poe says, “Let me get a doctor, okay? Just to throw an eye on you, make sure you’re alright.”

And he rushes off, and suddenly, Finn is alone.

The room is made of concrete, and the medical equipment Finn is connected to makes low noise that is echoed backward. He sees along the edges of the walls and doors and windows the growth of moss and mold. The air is moist and cool- humidity leaking in from the outside. 

All of the equipment is old. It’s not  _ ancient _ or anything, but First Order technology was always  _ excellent _ , totally clean and chrome. Very, very clean. This though, this is tinged with use, worn and a little rusted, flickering and uneven. It feels like it was made for people. 

Finn looks down at his hands for a moment, sees across them scars and scuffs and scrapes. 

When he thinks of himself, it’s still in the plasteel armor. Still faceless, still nameless. He still has to  _ think _ about this name that Poe gave him, instead of that number he rattled off for years. 

He’s still expecting to wake up and find that it’s actually some kind of dream, and he’ll wake up, back in the barracks. He’ll be a number again, he’ll be blaster fodder, he’ll be  _ no one _ . A stormtrooper in sanitation, in  _ cleanup _ , expected to pull the trigger and disappear the messes left by the Order all over the place, to leave order and rigidity in his wake, wherever he goes.

He coughs, and the movement aches all through his ribs, his back, his body. The sensation leaves him unpleasantly breathless.

Poe rushes back into the room, a doctor following him. 

Finn smiles at him, and Poe smiles back, through that heavy exhaustion, and Finn feels that racing, electric feeling inside of himself. That feeling like  _ sunlight _ that Poe puts in him. 


	3. Chapter 3

The general casts a long shadow. Not, you know,  _ literally _ , but there’s a stern quality to her, a shape of her brow, of her mouth. Something of her expression carries the whole world on it- the whole galaxy. 

Only the protocol droids still call her princess. That world disappeared a long time ago, when their cold war suddenly turned hot. But there’s something still there, maybe in her posture? In the crook of her spine, in the tense firmness of her eyebrows, maybe even in her hair (so clean, so neat, so cared for) that suggests a crown she might have worn once, or the stiffness of a throne. 

Poe has known her his whole life, some kind of aunt, and the effect is as intimidating now as it was when he actually  _ was  _ shorter than her. 

Poe stands at attention, when she enters the room. The General. 

His mother told him, once, about the world where she had grown up. The people she had lost. The noble lineage she was the last of. 

Poe can’t help but think that she wears the weight of the name  _ Organa  _ well.

“Commander,” she says, her voice light. Her voice is always a little lighter than Poe would suspect. “Stand at ease.”

And Poe does. Looks at her. Her eyes are dark and serious, but they hold in them that affection that makes her so special. 

There is a love inside of General Organa, this something that makes her the whole soul of the Resistance. 

Poe has worked under that love and with that love since he has had memory, and if he will not die in the freedom of a Republic, he will die with that love as his purpose. 

“General,” he greets.

General Organa looks at him with her dark, bright eyes and says, “Didn’t your friend, Finn Something, wake up in medical?”

Fin shifts his weight slightly. “Yes, ma’am,” he replies. “However, I was told that there was a scouting run and-”

She shakes her head. “Rest,” she says. “You lead the attack on the Starkiller and before that you lead the run on Takodana and before that, you were escaping capture and who  _ knows _ what else on Jakku- which, I can only assume was no picnic.” She cocks a slight smile. “I remember desert worlds,” she continues. “Not exactly  _ restful _ places.”

Poe finds himself frowning. “General, I-”

She shakes her head again. “No,” she replies. “There are other pilots in other squadrons we can use. We’re not going to fight this war using only one soldier.” 

Poe shifts his weight backwards, then forwards, trying to find the right objection. 

“Make repairs on your ship,” she says. “Spend some time with that young man you brought back from the star destroyer. Get some  _ sleep _ and do something about that ache in your left shoulder, for the love of-”

“Yes, General,” Poe says. “I understand-”

“No,” she says. “Commander Dameron-  _ Poe _ \- I understand.  _ I  _ understand. This isn’t a punishment. Go rest.”

* * *

Rey got in a ship and got out, basically as fast as she could.

She saw. She-

Rey knows pain. She's comfortable with pain; pain is perhaps the greatest teacher, but what Ren was doing, what Ren was trying to do...that's more than pain. Rey knows pain and Rey also knows what wrongness is, and it wasn't just that what Ren did...its not just that it hurt. It's not just that he hurt Finn, too. 

What if he did more than hurt Finn?

And Rey-

Rey gets Finn to the doctors, to the medical bay, she gets him there just long enough to see that Poe- the pilot- will be there to keep an eye on him. 

And then Rey- Rey pulls on a fresh set of clothes, ones given to her by the resistance SO and then she gets out of the system, toward a wide, wet world studded with islands. 

Rey gets out of there, because she can't stand the idea of waiting any longer. She can’t stand the thought of spending  _ more _ of her life waiting for only the worst to happen to her; she can’t stand the idea of doing  _ nothing _ , and looking out onto the actions of the Resistance, she knows acutely that there’s nothing there she could do to help. Nothing there that she could meaningfully contribute to. 

But she can fly, and she can fly the falcon, and she can recover Luke Skywalker ( _ the last Jedi _ ) to help the Resistance and maybe even help her learn how to use this strange, foreign, animal thing that is suddenly inside of her, awake and active and terrifying. 

And maybe when she gets back, even if Finn (who is the brightest star Rey has ever been near to) isn’t okay- even  _ if _ \- she’ll have done something, and she didn’t just wait, doing nothing. 

In the cockpit of the ship, piloting through hyperspace, unchained from that dry and terrible place she lived for so many years, Rey finally feels like she’s not  _ wasting _ something somehow. 

That doesn’t stop her mind from constantly drifting toward the base, toward the medical bay, toward a beautiful boy, toward a kind of sunlight. 


	4. Chapter 4

Poe walks into his bunk, tries to hold himself together, tries to stay calm. He still so tired though, under his eyes and under his fingernails and in his teeth and his eyelashes and lips and brows. He’s so tired, he can feel the details of himself, the way the ground rushes through the sole of his shoe to greet his foot. This, Poe feels, but he does not feel the physical action of walking to his bunker, of pulling his helmet off and tossing it on the floor, of laying down. He feels the pinching of springs and compression of foam under his back. 

He feels so tired, in every piece of himself, through his body, but mostly he is angry.

BB-8 wheels in, wiggles nervously.

“I’m okay,” Poe says. He can’t quite focus his eyes well, but he can’t sleep. Poe can’t sleep. “I’m okay, I just need some time to myself.”

BB-8 makes a slight, soft little sound, the kind that gives that emotional sensation of  _ concern _ and  _ disappointment _ , and then she wheels off. 

It’s Poe’s fault he’s grounded. It’s his fault. It’s his fault he’s not up there right now; it’s his fault he’s not leading the squadron; it’s his fault they crashed on Jakku; it’s his fault that Finn’s hurt- it’s  _ his fault _ , it’s his fault, it’s his fault.

Poe is so tired and everything hurts and he has no-one to blame but himself.

He takes a deep, deep breath, and then he sits up. He tugs off his boots and strips out of his flightsuit. Pulls on an old one that doesn’t quite fit anymore and grabs his toolkit and walks from his bunker to his ship.

There’s a rattle in his engine; it’s small, something he wouldn’t notice if he didn’t think to hear for it, but there’s probably something loose or something that shook its way in there, some piece of errant space debris that wound its way through the manifolds and into the hemispherical shapes of the intake, toward the thrust engines.

Poe straddles the wing and begins to methodically examine and deconstruct the engine before him. 

_ He says he remembers when those had four full circular intakes, _ Poe hears, from out of nowhere.

He looks up, he looks behind himself, he looks down. And he doesn’t see anyone nearby enough to have said something so  _ close _ to him.

Poe closes his eyes closely, tightly, before he opens them again.

He can’t help but think it sounded kind of like Rey.

* * *

 

Finn is tired, even after waking up from sleeping for days. He feels weak and physically loose. He feels  _ tired _ , and it occurs to him, in the wheelchair that the doctors gladly put him in, that this is the longest in his memory that he’s been  _ still _ . 

His sleep schedule was specific- from 02:00 to 06:00 was the time that his block spent time in the bunker. Rotating four hour schedule meant that the bunker was always full and most of the troopers were working, were busy. Finn feels strange, more tired than he’s ever been even with the physical knowledge of having slept so much, so long, so thoroughly. 

It’s not day. It’s night. And the base has settled down a bit- chances are the first shift sleeping is large and they’re resting before an early-morning shift. And he wheels from the medical bay to just...somewhere  _ else. _

Finn’s never seen X-Wings up close like this before. They’re so  _ different _ from the TIE-Fighters, their dual ion engines sending them  _ screaming  _ from space like children ripped from their beds. 

Finn shakes that thought out of his head, and wheels past them, their long lines beautiful in the dark. 

They’re graceful, in a way that the TIE-Fighters have never seemed, and they’re different machines than they were thirty years ago; the engines streamlined and made more aerodynamic for dogfighting and missions out of space, where those kind of things matter.

He looks up, at one of them, and sees Poe perched on top.

“Hey,” Finn says, “Shouldn’t you be asleep? When was the last time you slept?”

Poe leans down a little, to see him in the low light provided by handlights. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve got to repair this engine anyway and then I’ll hit the bunks.”

“Do you have the second shift?” Finn asks.

Poe’s face seems crumple, a thoughtful expression maybe. “Second shift for what?” He asks.

“Rotating shift,” Finn answers. “First Order, we...there was a rotation for who slept and who was awake, I thought maybe you were part of-”

Poe shakes his head. He slips off the wing of the ship and walks over to Finn. “I’m fine,” he says, and it’s clear that he  _ isn’t _ . He’s dead on his feet; Finn can see it. His shoulders look heavy where they slump forward to strain against his neck. 

He isn’t fine, and Finn can tell because he told him he was fine more or less totally unprompted. 

“So you don’t have to be awake right now and you’re not sleeping because your engine needs repair and you’re fine?” Finn asks.

Poe shrugs. “More or less. Why are you awake?”

“Are you kidding? I spent a week sleeping. I got more sleep than I’ve ever had in my  _ life _ . Of course I’m awake. I’ve got to make myself useful somehow, don’t I?”

“You’re  _ healing _ ,” Poe replies, and he sounds incredulous. “Your body needs a lot of sleep to get okay? I know that the First Order must have run you  _ ragged _ and the crash on Jakku shook me up and you got attacked with a  _ lightsaber!” _ This he says with a kind of surprise. “I mean, that hasn’t happened since before the first rebellion- since before the first  _ war _ !” He shakes his head, almost smiling, his mouth just quirked upward that barest tick. “You’ve already done more for us than I think I’ve ever done-”   
“That’s not true,” Finn says. “I’ve known you for less than a week and already you’ve-”   
And that’s the moment when Poe blinks a few times, eyes sticky and lazy, and then passes out right there.


	5. Chapter 5

When Poe comes to, he notices that the sky is a perfect concrete grey. That’s because, he realizes, slowly, he’s looking at concrete. He’s looking at the ceiling above him, and it’s made of the same duracrete that every other building on the base is made of. He’s looking at a duracrete ceiling and he’s looking at the ceiling of the medbay; this he can tell from the ambient noise around him, the low strange hums and buzzes of the instruments that are the medical equipment surrounding him in a kind of cocoon. 

Poe blinks his eyes open and sits up and he hears Doctor Kalonia go, “Not quite so fast, Mr. Dameron.”

Kalonia might use  _ General  _ or  _ Commander _ in the command center or even in the mess, but here, in her medbay,  _ Mister _ and  _ Miss _ are de rigeur, particularly if you’ve wound up in there through your own doing.

“You’ve not been eating or sleeping,” she continues. “You  _ quite _ alarmed your friend when you fainted and given your readings, he had good cause to be concerned about you.”

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” Poe murmurs.

“Is this the same  _ fine _ you had a few years ago when you weren’t sleeping or eating after your squardron saw serious losses under heavy enemy fire, or is this the  _ fine _ you had a few years ago when you weren’t sleeping or eating because you had picked up a parasite on Corelia?”

Poe wipes his hand over his face. “I have the ‘General pulled you off missions for the time being’  _ fine _ ,” he answers. 

Kalonia looks at him with her large, brown eyes. Assessing. Serious. “We have you on an intraveneous line right now and if you go from here to anywhere other than the mess or your bunk once it’s through, I’m going to have that Finn fellow secure you to a bed with restraints.” Her voice is stern, but not unkind. She’s a good doctor, well trained. Studied in the Empire and practiced on the Outer Rim before joining the resistance. They’re lucky to have her.

That doesn’t stop Poe from sighing, heavily. “There’s so much to  _ do _ ,” he says. “I can get it done and  _ then _ I can sleep or eat or-”   
“You’re no good to us in a bunk in medbay,” she says. “I could give you something, to sleep.”

Poe shakes his head. 

He can’t tell her that he’s not sleeping because lurking under his eyelids, all the time, is what happened on the  _ Finalizer _ . He can’t tell her that because he can’t tell anyone that he can’t- 

They can’t know that Poe is...that Poe can begin to feel the edges of himself unravel.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m just...I’m just  _ regular _ , fine, Doc.”

He stays in there for another twenty minutes while the intravenous line runs into him, and then he gets up and walks to the mess to order a bowl of something to eat and poke at it.

* * *

 

Finn’s eating something in the mess- an uneven stew of root vegetables with a big piece of bread when Poe walks in and sits in front of him, across the table.

“Hey,” he says, looking up at him with those same  _ exhausted _ eyes. “How you holdin’ up?”

Finn would shrug, but he’s learned by now that shrugging pulls the muscles in his back, the ones wrapped up in bacta bandages that are healing. “I’m holding up,” he answers. “The doctor said that the bacta is already helping to accelerate the healing on my back. I’ll still have scars, but it’s not like I didn’t have some of those to start.”

Poe smiles at him a little. “You should sleep,” he says.    
“I’ll sleep when you sleep, Commander  _ Passes Out On the Runway  _ Dameron,” Finn answers, taking a bite. The chunks of vegetable in it are unevenly chopped but it’s warm and comforting and it has more texture than any of the freeze-dried meals that the First Order gave him. 

Poe reaches across and grabs the chunk of bread. He dunks it into the stew and takes a bite of it. “I’m  _ fine _ ,” He says.

“You’re not fine,” Finn answers. “People who pass out in front of me are definitely not  _ fine _ , Poe. Maybe you’ve got some kind of delusional condition that’s making you think you’re fine but you’re not fine. You have to go to sleep. Unless you’re a droid, you have to go to sleep, and even droids have low power mode.”

Poe sighs. “I can’t sleep,” he murmurs.

“Are you sure?” Finn replies. “Because I think you can but you’re  _ not _ -”

“On the  _ Finalizer _ ,” Poe interrupts, his voice tight but low. Quiet. As if ashamed. “Ben- Kylo Ren, he...did you ever...did you ever see, what he’d do?”   
Finn feels his heart drop. Finn never saw, but he heard and he  _ knew _ . 

Word got around.

Poe throws his hands up, lets them settle in his hair for a moment before he shakes his head and stands, walking away.

Finn pulls away from the table, wheels after him as fast as he can go. 


	6. Chapter 6

Finn’s done enough. He’s gone through enough. He’s had... _ enough _ . Finn has enough on his plate without having to carry Poe’s extraneous nonsense as well.

Poe just can’t  _ believe _ he- he can’t believe he’s said this much.

He’s so angry when he stands up, he doesn’t even waver in the sea of spots that cloud his vision suddenly. He doesn’t even feel it, the dizziness of exhaustion, until he’s stepping outside and has to prop himself up against a doorway. 

Poe can’t add to Finn’s burden. 

“Hey,” Finn says. “I know that Kylo Ren was a real piece of work, okay, you don’t have to-”

“He didn’t even recognize me,” Poe murmurs. 

Finn stops. He wheels in front of Poe, and Poe, leaning against the metal structure of the mess, sinks to the ground and buries his head in his hands. 

Finn doesn’t say anything, and it’s not that his silence is expectant, but there is something to it that Poe knows is a gift.

He wishes he weren’t supposed to take a gift like this, because Poe can’t take from Finn. 

“I’m a couple years older than him but he was always on the base and then he was in training and then...when he...I remember the General and Solo...I remember them fighting after it happened and I remember Solo leaving and I always thought...I always thought that maybe it wasn’t true or that it was exaggerated but even behind the mask- I could  _ tell _ , Finn.” Poe sighs heavily, pulling his fingers through his hair. “It was  _ Ben _ .” 

He sighs. He closes his eyes. 

“It hurt,” Poe says.  “He knew me and he didn’t recognize me or maybe he didn’t  _ care _ . Maybe he didn’t care. But whatever he was or whoever he was...he hurt me. And he’s hurting other people. I know he’s hurting other people. A whole system of Republic worlds are  _ gone _ and he did it. My problems, what he did to me, that’s so small. It’s just me. He barely knew me in the first place- I barely knew him in the first place and it was just- I’m just one guy and I’m just some pilot. ”

Poe lets his fingernails drag over his flightsuit, over the knee of it and the way the material is pilled over it. “He hurt a lot of people but he hurt  _ me _ ,” Poe mutters.

Finn doesn’t say anything for a long time, but when he does speak again, he says, “You can’t stop remembering.”

“Nightmares,” Poe answers. 

“It’s not your fault,” Finn says. 

“Please,” Poe answers. “I’m sorry- I’m sorry- don’t tell anyone? What happened? Please. I don’t want to talk about. it and if the General knew...I can’t have General Organa know, she’s hurt enough. He’s hurt her enough”

“I don’t think it was her fault, either,” Finn murmurs. “Some people just like to hurt people. We had some guys like that in the barracks, in the FK and FL blocks. Most of them were placed in different assignments than me and I didn’t miss them when they went. The needles in my gloves were irritating the first time it happened, it was scary the sixth.” 

Poe looks up at him. Finn’s eyes are wide and nervous. “I want you to be okay,” Finn says. “And I get if that will take some time. But you need rest in order to heal and right now, you’re not resting.”

Poe can’t help but smile. “My own line against me, eh?” Poe says. 

Finn doesn’t shrug, but there’s a way he crooks his head that’s almost a shrug. 

“I bet if you wanted to sleep in medbay, with observation, Kalonia would let you,” Finn says. “Someone could probably wake you up if you started having nightmares.” He pauses. “I could probably wake you up, if you started having nightmares.”

Poe finds himself biting his lip, standing up and running his hands back through his hair. He stands. 

“I’m tired,” he murmurs. 

And they amble off, toward the direction of Poe’s bunk.


	7. Chapter 7

Rey catches flickers. Glimmers. A kind of shimmer, through something, into her consciousness. It comes and it goes.   
It was a long trip, in hyperspace, and there was time out of it navigating through asteroid clusters to boot. Chewbacca, who knows more about how to pilot the Falcon than Rey (who is invaluable in his nearly boundless knowledge) made a comment beside her, one she gathered has something to do with space having less room in it than it used to.   
She’s been on world with Master Skywalker for two weeks now, and things are strange and different every day.   
“Can you teach me,” Rey says, one day, after a long day of running and climbing and doing pushups, sitting exhausted at a table, “can you teach me how to keep people out of my mind?”  
Master Skywalker startles. He stops what he’s doing, fiddling with a brace of fish roasting over charcoal. He looks at her.  
His eyes are blue, but not the kind of blue that the sea is around them. The kind of blue of the sky over Jakku, or maybe another dry and dusty and isolated world. They are blue and haunted.   
“Kylo...Kylo Ren, he-”  
Master Skywalker nods. “It was an old technique,” he says. “It was used by once Jedi and Sith alike- it is not hard to manipulate a week mind.”  
Rey nods. Master Skywalker flips the brace of fish and dishes out a boiled grain into a bowl.   
“I want you to imagine an X-Wing,” he says. “Hold the image in your mind- the shape of it, the sound of it, all of it.”  
Rey thinks of the ship Poe Dameron flies. She thinks of the long slender nose and the four, crossed wings. She thinks of it’s hemispherical engines, of its black on orange paint-  
“When I flew them, the engines were still completely round,” Master Skywalker comments.   
Rey looks at him, aghast.  
“There are techniques for stealth, to take but gently and quietly or to only take what is proferred,” he explains. “More difficult and less obvious than the technique Kylo Ren, but its roots are the same. From what you told me of your escape, you already have some of the basics but I agree with you- learning the more refined and advanced form will be useful to you.”  
He places the fish and grain before her, a bigger meal than one she ever had on Jakku. In the time she has spent here, this is what she has most frequently eaten, in this incredible quantity. This world is abundant, alive in a way Jakku never was. Jakku was always a graveyard, a place where every sign of life came from elsewhere, a place with no native sentient species or animals.  
A nowhere.   
“I’m going to think of something now,” Master Skywalker says. “Please, try to take it from me.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter is short due to computer problems.


	8. Chapter 8

Rey didn’t realize how much the connection she felt between Finn and Poe was changing her until she found herself on world with Master Skywalker and was away from them.   
Three weeks, she’s been there, and she finds her mind wandering toward them. She can feel the shape of them in the distant systems; she can feel the warmth, the love inside of Finn (who is awake) and she can feel a kind of radiant exhaustion but a remarkable kindness from Poe. She can feel them, feel them as acutely as she can feel the less distant life-signs of Chewbacca and R2 down the long stone steps, at the landing site of the Falcon. She can feel the distant kind of way Finn has laughter, has joy in all things- in so many things. She can feel the way he heals, she can feel the way he becomes more confident, the way he rests and sleeps and eats.   
She can feel the weight on Poe’s shoulders, the incredible and fantastic weight of it. The unbearable quality of it. She can feel the guilt, the exhaustion, the drive.  
Rey reaches outward, reaches for him, for his tired eyes and readily given smile.   
And she finds him.   
Here, they are more than midway through the daycycle, the local star beginning to dip lower into the sky. She’s finished physical training and she’s supposed to be meditating, and she finds Poe.   
It’s night on D’Qar; closer to early morning than it is to evening. She can tell by the way he’s present but not focusing that he’s doing something with a ship.  
“He says he remembers when those had four full circular intakes,” she says.   
“Rey?” She hears, and she opens her eyes, and Master Skywalker is there, looking something between amused and concerned.   
“Yes, Master?” She asks.  
He opens his mouth, and closes it, as if looking for the right thing to say, the right words to find.   
“I know I have not told you a lot about the history- our history, as Jedi,” he says, finally. “I know that usually we reserve this time for meditation, but with your...permission, I would like to relate to you some information that might be helpful.”  
Rey does not move, but she does nod, and Master Skywalker sits down, beside her. Rey has her legs crossed, but Master Skywalker drapes his own over the side of the cliff.   
“Once,” he says, “both the light side and the dark side of the force had...had great power. More power than that available by the force alone, that is, both sides had political power. Both sides commanded armies, were part of governments, both ruled worlds- ruled systems. There’s a history that’s...my masters told me it was thousands of years old.”  
He pauses. Picks up a few smooth, round stones and tosses one into the sea.   
“Both sides made rules. Codes of conduct. And they brought a lot of people- a lot of Jedi- a measure of peace and structure and meaning. There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the Force.”  
Rey lets that thought, that knowledge, roll through her mind.   
“What about…friendship? Or love?” She asks.  
Master Skywalker tosses a stone into the sea, letting it skip over the water before plummeting. The motion must have been force assisted, to move among the waves for so long before succumbing to them.   
“I have long struggled with this as well,” he comments. “I believe- and maybe this is a move to apostasy- but I believe this was done to prevent Jedi from becoming vulnerable to the possibility of the dark side. Love and friendship- connection- these are powerful ideals. Powerful forces. But rejection, disconnection- these can lead to pain. To revenge. To hate.”  
Master Skywalker looks at her now. His gaze is serious.   
“I do not think you are a child, Rey,” he says. “I believe to seek friendship, affection, love, connection- this can be deeply satisfying. Deeply important. I fear- as I think my masters before me did- that in seeking these connections, you will make yourself vulnerable to hate. But I also think you are responsible- I think you are wise past your age. Far wiser than I was at your age. I trust you to talk to me, about your feelings. I trust you to use your power meaningfully, for great good. I trust you to know.”  
Rey picks up a stone of her own. Lets it rest heavy in her palm. She grounds her thoughts here, on this world with Master Skywalker- with Luke.  
“I want to tell you these things now because I did not want you not knowing to feel like I was somehow withholding information from you, or that I was being disingenuous,” he says.  
The silence between them holds a moment longer, filled with the rush and crash of the sea.   
“You are excused from further meditation today,” he says. “Tomorrow we will begin preparations to head to D’Qar. Your thoughts seem to be there already; maybe you’ll focus better there knowing what you miss is safe.”  
Rey feels herself flush as Master Skywalker stands and leaves.  
She sits on the cliff for a long time, watching the sea move and the sky fall slowly to meet it.


	9. Chapter 9

There are two bunks in Poe’s quarters now, and now they’re “Poe and Finn’s quarters.”  
It’s been that way for a few weeks now. Poe repairs his ship, goes to Kalonia for injections for his left shoulder (which grinds when the whisper of humidity is present- here on D’Qar the pain is constant), he flies scouting missions in the system, he repairs the ships for other pilots in the squadron. Finn goes to therapy, relearning his healing muscles, he meets people on base, he reads manual after manual of information, he reads histories, he asks questions.  
“So, how many systems belong to the Republic?” He asks.  
“Which acts of aggression did Alderaan participate in before retaliation by the Empire?” He asks.  
Little things. Little indicators that Finn’s history of the galaxy was maybe...skewed.   
Poe’s in his bunk one night, not sleeping but resting, focusing on the sound of Finn breathing in the room. It’s not sleeping- Finn being there, his sound and presence can help ward off the nightmares but doesn’t keep them away all together- but it’s near to the action and it’s soothing.  
Poe hears the hitch of breath and then the physical, bodily rustle, and he knows that Finn is awake.  
“She’s coming back,” he says. “She’s nearly here.”  
Poe doesn’t even have to ask who.   
“Already?” He asks, instead.  
“Yeah,” Finn answers. “I can feel it. Her. I can feel her. Within the hour, I think. She’s still in hyperspace.”  
“You wanna greet her when she gets here?” Poe asks.  
“Yeah,” Finn responds.  
“Well, alright,” Poe says.   
He switches the light on in the bunk and pulls on a flightsuit from yesterday. The material is rough without underwear or an undershirt to insulate him. He zips it up and runs his fingers through his hair, trying to straighten out his bedhead. Across, Finn pulls on a sweater and carefully stands, trying not to stretch the muscles the wrong way.  
They walk carefully to the landing pad, at Finn’s slow and deliberate pace. It takes a while, but Poe is content to amble rather than rush, and it’s easy to go slower with the rest of the base asleep.  
They get to the landing pad and maybe twenty minutes later, the Falcon lands, and moments after landing, the loading bay opens and R2-D2 rolls out, followed by a surprisingly small figure in robes and Chewbacca, who carries Rey, sleeping, in his arms.  
“While we were in hyperspace, she fell asleep. I was loath to wake her. Chewie and I managed.”  
“Luke!” Poe hears and he and Finn turn around to see the General- her braids loose from sleep and her clothes rumpled- jogs to the landing pad to meet him.  
Her brother.  
They embrace. It’s not quite a hug; it’s weightier than that. It’s meaningful and heavy. Poe turns away, to give them that privacy, and turns to the Wookiee.   
“She heavy?” He asks.  
Chewbacca makes a soft sound, something that feels like a no.  
“I can take her,” he says. “We’ve got an extra bunk and I’m sure there are some repairs I could get to.”  
Chewbacca makes another sound, in that strange, gurgling, guttural language people like him speak.   
Poe carefully takes Rey- who is so much lighter than she has any business being- and turns to Finn.   
He smiles a little. “Wanna help me get her to a bunk?” He asks quietly. Finn nods, eagerly.  
They walk quietly away from the pad and toward the barracks.

* * *

When Rey wakes up, she’s not on the Falcon. She can tell because it’s so much quieter and warmer than the Falcon, the air wetter as well. She blinks awake, and she curled up in a bed, wrapped in a scratchy blanket, in a dim, soft space.   
She sits up slowly. Across from her is another bed, the blankets and sheets an unmade mess. On the walls are an assortment of diagrams and drawings- technical specs and details of ships. A small table with a datapad and a small personal holo-projector. There are a few different helmets for X-Wings, and that’s when she places it- feels the shape of where this is.   
Resistance base. Poe’s room.   
She must have fallen asleep while they were flying. Preparations to leave had been trying- the Falcon still needs more repair but it’s in better shape than it had been, and while preparing to go, she’d still been training.  
She stands, looks at the bed she’d been placed in. Fewer possessions, almost spartan in its arrangement. Everything clear and specific in its place and approach.   
There’s a wheelchair folded up in a corner and crutches beside it.   
_Finn_ , she thinks.   
The door opens and Poe walks in, his hair wet, wrapped in a towel and nothing else.  
“Oh,” he exclaims. “Ah- _kriff_ \- sorry, I thought you’s still be- sorry, I was in the refresher and I wanted to grab-”  
And Rey finds herself laughing, unable to help it or stop.   
Poe’s face shifts from embarassed to nervous to a loose and easy smile.   
“Yeah, and good morning to you too, Miss Rey,” he chuckles. “You think you could do this in the hall while I get decent.”  
Rey smiles at him before she leaps up and hugs him, feeling the moisture of his skin soak into her clothes. She feels an incredible, breathless joy- she’s here. They’re here. Poe’s here and-  
She dashes out into the hall- searching.  
It was all real.

 


	10. Chapter 10

Finn lets Rey sleep, even though it’s difficult. 

She looks small in Poe’s arms (bigger than she had in Chewbacca’s arms, but everyone is dwarfed by a seven foot tall wookiee). She looks slight and delicate, not impenetrable and sturdy and solid- undefeatable. 

Finn more or less can’t stand it, and he can’t stand her not being awake, being animate and active, and he can’t stand not  _ waking _ her, so he goes to the mess to drink a few burnt cups of caf and wait.

He reads manuals- he’s  _ reading _ one, when he hears her familiar, bright voice cry out, “ _ Finn!” _

He looks up and she barrels through the mess hall, to him, where she wraps her arms around him and he holds her and they’re both real in this moment together- they’re both awake and here and okay. They’re okay, and they’re here together. 

“I missed you,” he says.

“I thought about you every day,” she answers.

When they pull away, Finn gets a good look at her. Her skin isn’t burnt anymore, but it is covered in a smattering of freckles where the tan has faded and the burn has peeled away. Her clothes are different- they’re not the assorted rags from when she lived on Jakku. And she’s still so magnificently, incredibly muscular, her body all hard and stringy and tough.

And she looks so happy to be here she practically  _ glitters.  _

“Master Skywalker and I started making preparations to come back weeks ago!” She exclaims. “I wanted to contact you and let you know but the General wanted radio silence so our location couldn’t be tracked by the First Order.”

She hugs him again. “You’re alive!” She exhales, joyously. “I knew that but I’m still quite pleased about it.”

“How was training with Luke Skywalker?” Finn asks. “Are you a full Jedi now?”

“No!” Rey answers, laughing. “Not even close! He came back with me; I’m still training but he said that I had learned all he could teach me in seclusion so we came back here so I can help with missions and maybe he can, too.”

Finn feels something inside of him ease- releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding- as he sees her. As she’s here.

She’s here. It’s her. 

“Have you eaten?” Finn asks. “Are you hungry?”

Her stomach growls, as if on cue, and Finn grins again. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you something. The food’s really good- better than any of the dehydrated stuff or the porridge stuff.” 

He stands, slowly, carefully, working to not pull his muscles the wrong way. 

“How are you healing?” Rey asks, her voice suddenly serious and stern. “Are the doctors good? I could look at it- I can give stitches and remove them myself.”

“No, the doctors are great, Rey- I had bacta on it for a while and-”   
“What’s bacta?” Rey asks.

* * *

 

Rey dashed out quickly, like a comet shooting across the sky, there and then gone. Poe watches the space right after she’d left, sees the trail of her energy, the ghost of her.

He feels the remainder of her hug left on his body, the strength of her arms and the warmth of her left onto him. 

Poe looks upward, closes his eyes. He pulls his towel off from around his hips and runs his over his hair again. Opens up his footlocker and tugs on a pair of boxers and an undershirt. And then he sits down on his bunk for a hard, long moment.

Finn and Rey- 

They’re going to take each other away from him. Fall madly in love and find some beautiful and shining. They’re going to make each other madly, deliriously happy. 

And Poe is going to be alone again.

He closes his eyes. 

He wishes he could sleep. 

 


	11. Chapter 11

Finn shows Rey the mess, where she takes a double helping of everything and eats  _ all of it _ , with a kind of overwhelming, ravenous ease that makes something in Finn wary and scared. Something that makes him angry.

First Order, they may not have had the kind of self-regulating plenty that the Resistance has, but there was always  _ enough _ . Soldiers- stormtroopers- are not efficient when they do not have enough. Efficiency is why Finn can read, it’s why he is strong and sturdy, it’s why Finn can load and operate any blaster that’s been made for the past sixty standard years, it’s why he had a number instead of a name for so long- for more than twenty years. Efficiency is why Finn has an immune system full of every vaccine made by First Order and Empire doctors and strong, serious muscles. Efficiency was what defined him- what  _ still _ defines him, anxious to heal and be useful to this new place, for these new people. 

He can’t use space and not- not contribute.

He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Rey, though, eats inefficiently, like she has never had enough. She watches everything like she has never been safe. She keeps her eyes sharp- the same look she had in that market on Jakku that she had when Finn saw her on Starkiller. 

“I don’t know my way around too well yet,” he says. “but uh, that was the mess and those are the barracks and that’s medbay- do you have injuries? Are you feeling okay? We could have a doc or one of the med-droids check you out.”

Rey shakes her head. “No,” she answers. “No, I’m fine, I promise. What’s that?”

“That’s central command,” Finn answers. “Where the General hangs out-”   
“Master Skywalker’s sister?” She asks.

Finn frowns, thinking. “Uh,” he says, “I uh- I don’t know. She hasn’t said and I didn’t ask, or really, think to ask-”

“Master Skywalker told me,” she says. “He said he could feel her here like I could feel you and Poe.”

They walk towards a duracrete retaining wall, sitting down on it. “You could feel Poe and I?” He asks. “All the way out- out there?”

Rey nods. “It was why I came backs so soon, to complete my training here,” she replies. “I couldn’t keep my mind away- I worried about you. I knew you had woken up but I wasn’t sure if you were safe or healed or-or okay.”   
Finn finds himself smiling.

* * *

 

_ It hurts _ . 

_ It’s not any moment of specific physical agony, it’s- it’s that every nerve in his body, it’s made of lead. It’s made of fire. It’s fire and it’s burning him inside out, chasing him through his memories, scorching through what he remembers, what he can remember of his childhood, of his mother, of his grandmother, of home, of here, of warmth, of light. _

_ It hurts and he can’t make it stop hurting- he can’t break, he can’t tell, he can’t, he can’t. He can’t.  _

Poe wakes up suddenly, painfully, his lungs aching and scorching, searching for air.

Poe wakes up and he can’t breathe.

The door to his room opens and the lights come on and then there’s cool, steady hands on his brow, pulling his locks away from his sweating forehead, holding him there, holding him steady. 

“Poe,” he hears a voice say, calmly, smoothly, “Poe, can you hear me? Are you there Poe?”

“He hasn’t been sleeping,” another voice says.

“Poe, can you try to breathe with me?” the first voice says. “Take a deep breath in with me, okay, deep and long- can you-”

Poe can’t find the catch, can’t find the space in his lungs that will make him breathe, make him inhale, he simply can’t find it through the haze, through the blur-

“BB-8, go get a doctor!” the second voice calls out, urgent but calm. “Do you know how to- how to-”

Another hand slides up under his shirt, over his heartbeat and rests there. Still cool and steady but smaller. 

Poe can feel everything and nothing, but mostly he feels like he’s choking. 

“Poe, I want you to focus on my voice, okay?” The first voice continues. “I’m going to keep breathing and I want you to try okay? Okay? They taught me resuscitation in the First Order but I don’t wanna have to use it, okay? Breathe with me, okay?”

“I’m going to find Master Skywalker,” the second voice says. “This feels wrong. This feels dark.”

Poe tries to focus on hearing, on feeling, on being here and breathing, on breathing- 

The world gets fuzzy, gets dark, gets narrow and painful-

 


	12. Chapter 12

Rey felt it. She was seeing the refresher with Finn, guiding her around, when she knew- a solid kind of certainty- that Poe needs them. 

She could feel where his room was through the sensation of him alone. And when she saw him, shaking and gasping, not breathing, she knew- 

So now she’s trying to ignore that spooling, pulling feeling that’s trying to tug her to Poe’s bedside, she ignores it with every bit of herself that she’s not directed toward focuses on finding Master Skywalker.

Master Skywalker will know. He has to know. He has to know.

He must feel, though, because he meets Rey meters outside of the barracks and she doesn’t have to say anything to explain. He just nods and follows her.

The air in the room feels wrong. The quality of the light on her skin feels wrong, the texture of the world, it all- it all feels so wrong, so strange, so  _ bad _ .

It feels as hopeless and empty and crowded and torturous as that chamber, with Kylo Ren, on the Starkiller.

* * *

 

Finn saw a seizure, once.

A training exercise, a simulator. A Flight simulator, flashing lights. One of them, in the KT unit- fell. Twitching. Shaking. 

Finn never saw her again. 

This isn’t a seizure. This isn’t quite like that; Poe’s in there, Poe can hear him, Poe is  _ trying _ . Finn can tell from the way Poe’s eyes are searching but not quite  _ connecting _ that Poe can hear him and that he’s trying. 

So this isn’t a seizure, but it is Poe on a bed, not breathing, screaming, gasping, choking for air, and Finn trying to break through to him. 

BB-8 comes back with Kalonia less than a minute later, and Rey comes with Master Skywalker soon after.

“Rey sensed that something was wrong and so we came and-”

“Please move,” Kalonia murmurs, taking the space Finn has been occupying on the bunk. She leans forward, presumably to hear him, her own hand finding the spot along Poe’s neck where blood flushes through, around his body.

When they were still figuring out what Finn would do, what unit he would be placed in, they taught him anatomy, to the end of being an efficient torturer. 

A medical droid comes in, its two hands paddles to electrically resuscitate Poe it needed.

Finn feels sick, just seeing it.

“His heart won’t take adrenaline,” Kalonia murmurs, “but his airway is rapidly constricting.”

Finn sees something like a  _ bruise _ begin to spread over Poe’s throat.

_ Enough _ , Master Skywalker mutters, and Poe’s body goes from rigid and straining to lax and gasping instantaneously.

Rey’s eyes not once drift from Poe- her gaze steady and serious.

“He hurt him, too,” she whispers.

Doctor Kalonia lays her stethoscope over Poe’s heart, listening. Counting.

She turns to Master Skywalker. “I take it this is an injury for a doctor of the force than of the body,” she says. Her voice is serious but not cold. All business.

Master Skywalker nods, gravely. “He remembers,” he says. 

“BB-8,” she says, addressing the astromech, “if anything like this happens again, send an alert directly to me.”

She leaves, and the medical droid follows her.

* * *

 

Poe feels his eyes not so much open as flicker slowly on, the way the systems on a ship slowly come to life. He feels a kind of racing sensation in his head, a zipping and pinging of energy and thought from one space to another, and then he feels an acute sensation of  _ dread _ . 

“Carefully,” he hears Rey say, her voice soft and gentle. “Please, be gentle with yourself.”

Poe turns his head to the side slowly, and there she is.

Her brow is furrowed, intent. Something heart-sore lurks in her eyes. 

“I had a nightmare,” Poe murmurs.

“You had more than that,” a different voice says. 

Poe moves to sit up, and Rey guides him gently upward. 

Master Skywalker sits on the windowsill that looks outward into the forest. 

“Master-”   
“I suspect your memory of what happened on the Finalizer left a bigger impression than you’d like to admit,” he interrupts.

“I’m  _ fine _ -”

“You were choking,” Rey interrupts this time. “I could feel it- I could feel you choking. You were choking because you were remembering, you were remembering the torture and it was like the force was remembering, too. It was like the Force  _ knew _ how to hurt you- it  _ knew _ .”

“Rey,” Master Skywalker says.

“No,” she says. “No, you’re  _ hurting _ and it’s building and it’s also hurting Finn.”

“Rey,” Master Skywalker repeats, his voice a little  _ different  _ this time.

She looks from Poe to him. 

“He’s healing,” he says. “Maybe go tell Finn he’s awake.”

Rey closes her eyes. Inhales for a long moment before she reaches forward and hugs Poe. 

She leaves.

Poe watches her go, watches the space where she left for a long moment. 

“I don’t know her,” he says. “I barely- I barely know her. I know the things Finn told me but I don’t know her.”

“She cares,” he answers. “Very deeply. Very acutely.” He pauses for a moment. “She told you most of the thoughts I had about this already. Not talking or not telling anyone about it, it’s hurting you.”

“I just need to be stronger,” Poe says. “I can figure it out, I can work through it I can be-”

“A broken bone is not stronger than the healed one,” he says. 

Poe brings his hands to his eyes, as if to grind out the image and memory of it all. “I can’t put more on everyone here,” he says. “Everyone is hurting so much already and needs so much and is aching and I can’t be another thing that hurts for them.”

“What you’re doing now isn’t making them hurt less,” Master Skywalker responds. “And because they can’t figure out how to help or what’s wrong, they’re worried they can’t help you at all.”

“Finn and Rey and the General and BB-8 and you-”

“You don’t have to protect them, or me,” he says.

Poe looks up, as Rey and Finn come into the room. Both of them.

Finn  looks like he can’t quite figure out what to do with himself. 

“Hi,” Poe says. “I’m tired and everything hurts.”


	13. Chapter 13

“Rey, where have you been sleeping?” Finn asks one morning, in the mess. 

Rey looks up at him, over a bowl of porridge with dried fish and vegetables. Her hair’s a mess- she clearly slept on it that way, without redoing it, still in those three looped buns. Her eyes look tired and she still has a blanket wrapped over her shoulders. 

Poe looks back at Finn, who is fully dressed, alert, awake, finished eating, finished with his caf, cleared his dishes- everything. 

“Falcon,” she answers. “There are a few racks in there, for crew and for the pilot.”

Poe frowns. “You know there’s barracks, right?”

Rey shrugs. “I didn’t know who to ask and I don’t want to take up space,” she answers. “It’s comfortable in there.”

“What about the heat?” Poe asks. “It gets cold at night and it doesn’t run life support systems without the engines on.”

“Blankets,” Rey answers. “Warmer in there than it was at night on Jakku.”

“Oh,” Finn answers. 

They eat breakfast together, all three of them, every day. Finn is still bunking with Poe, the room split between the two of them more or less evenly, but Poe spends most of his day elbow deep in the machines that keep the Resistance running and Finn spends most of his time either in physical therapy or in the armory, disassembling every weapon in the SO’s care and reassembling it, cleaned. Rey spends most of her time with Master Skywalker, training. Meditating. But they always catch breakfast together and stick around until all three of them have eaten.

Poe does it because he wants to see Finn and he wants to see Rey. Rey and Finn do it because they’ve got to eat sometime, and Finn thrives with schedules, with set information, with knowledge of what he’s going to do, all day. Rey does it because otherwise she will ignore the hunger instinct, swallow and excuse it away, instead of eating anything. 

Finn does it because he’s trained to do the same thing, every day and Rey does it because she cannot break herself of the habits built by nineteen years of scarcity.

And Poe does it because he has to see them .

“Rey, I could talk to the SO or whoever’s in charge of the barracks and get you a room,” he says. “I know there are a few that are empty or some spare bunks, if you want to sleep closer to everything.”

The landing pad is a fair distance from the mess and from the forest where Rey does training, and the Falcon is at the far edge of it, too. Not far, but just far enough to be an inconvenient walk. 

Rey looks at him. “I don’t want to be alone,” she says. “And Chewbaccas’s rack is in the Falcon because none of the doorways in the barracks are tall enough for him.”

“You could stay with us,” Finn blurts. “With me and Poe.”

Rey looks at him, with wide, open eyes. “Really?” She asks.

“Yeah!” Finn replies. “Yeah, we could probably rack the beds and use the vertical space in there- I could take top if you’re worried about climbing and I could probably use the plasma torches to weld them together for stability.”

Rey smiles, a little, to herself, and takes another bite of her porridge.

With no work of his own- without even consulting him, Poe has gone from no roommates as a commander with a private bunk to having two roommates. He smiles. Pokes at his own bowl of porridge, which sports salt and a drizzle of oil. 

“Poe, you should eat,” Rey says. 

Poe looks up at her. 

“You didn’t eat dinner last night,” she says. “Or the night before that. And BB-8 tells me you spend all your time in those engines without lunch. And you hardly eat breakfast.”

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t realize.  I’ve just been- I have a lot on my mind. Sorry.”

“Master Skywalker, he told me that he could talk to you, if you’d like,” she says. “He was a brilliant pilot, a long time ago. You could probably talk to him about engines, if you’d like.”

Poe smiles at her. “And distract from your training? I couldn’t dare.”

“Finn,” General Organa calls from nearby. 

Finn immediately stands, at attention, serious. “Yes, General,” he replies, stiffly.

There’s a pause, and Poe sees in the moment the way she  _ assesses.  _

“At ease,” she murmurs, and there’s a lightness to her tone, as if somehow this can be a joke between them.

The General is very good at what she does. 

Finn relaxes slightly, but he still looks like a taut string. 

“The SO has told me that you’ve been cleaning our inventory for us,” she says.

“Yes, General,” Finn replies.

“You are well acquainted with all of our equipment; I was wondering if you were taught improvised repairs and weaponry with the First Order,” she continues. 

“Yes, General,” Finn responds.

“Would you be comfortable demonstrating to some of our new recruits these skills? As I understand it, First Order military training is invaluable and I would appreciate the opportunity to use your intelligence,” she asks.

“Yes, General,” Finn answers.

“Excellent,” General Organa says. “Commander Dameron should be able to help you- he’s leading the training.”

“I- what?” Poe says. 

“New recruits,” she says. “You have more field experience than most of the people in the resistance and they should know what you know. I’d hate for what you know to go to waste with you doing all the work our mechanics do already- I’ve been fielding complaints all week from the maintenance droids and techs about you being in the way, using the tools, and not filing the paperwork. You’re a pilot and fighter, not a tech. Between you and Finn, the new recruits should shape up to be quite formidable.”

“But I-”

“Thank you, Commander Dameron,” she says, raising an eyebrow, in that  _ way _ that makes it clear that this is no argument, and then she walks out of the mess.

Poe pushes the bowl of porridge away from himself and runs his hands through his hair.

Barely into the daycycle and already, things are being decided.

* * *

 

Rey clears her bowl from the table once Finn and Poe leave. She finishes Poe’s breakfast for him, loath to let food go to waste, and shrugs out of her blanket, folding it up and tucking it under her arm.  She walks, quickly out of the mess and past the refresher and the barracks, further past to the rough path that leads into the woods. It forks, after a few dozen meters, darting either deeper into the wood or to a cool, clear lake with icy water. She follows the fork that leads to the lake, moving quickly.

She gets to the shore  and drapes the blanket over a tree bough and slips out of her shoes, takes a few frigid steps into the water when she hears a voice say, “You’re late.”

She turns. Master Skywalker stands there. He is not angry, but he is amused. 

“Poe didn’t finish his breakfast,” she says. “I couldn’t let the food-”   
“I understand,” Master Skywalker interrupts. “Are you ready?”

Rey nods.

Master Skywalker shrugs out of his over-robe and pulls off his own boots. He walks to the edge of the water, beside Rey, and the two of them stride into the lake.

Rey takes a deep breath- she likes to connect this feeling to the sensation of an inhalation. 

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

She feels Master Skywalker beside her, but her consciousness, her awareness of the force, is bounded by the borders of the deep, wide lake. 

She spreads it to the lifeforms smaller than master luke, to the fish. She narrows from the fish to the insect, to the spawn, to the eggs, to the bacteria. 

She feels, sensationally, the bigness and largeness of all things, bound to the water. The birds who skirt along its edges and its surface, dipping into the water. 

She feels it all, feels the plants, the algae, the moss, the plankton- she feels everything. She feels everything.

And then slowly-

Slowly, she begins to narrow her focus back down-

From the totalizing outward back to the internal inward.

From the water outside to the fire within.

Rey pulls inward and tries to find that source, within. 


	14. Chapter 14

Poe looks...serene.   
They’re in a clearing, a few kilometers away from central base. He’s sitting on a stack of cases of materials- weapons, manuals, micro-explosives. They’re not responsible for all of the training for the new recruits, just some of it- weapons, field knowledge.   
It’s a green morning, like it always is, here on D’Qar. There’s a heavy coat of moss on every tree branch and trunk. The trees are alive, bird rich and bug-plenty with the occasional rustling of a small creature in the underbrush. Finn has never spent so much time in a place so alive before- life with the First Order was populated either solely with humans or droids, and this active, breathing, living place is incredible.   
And Poe looks like he belongs among it in a way that makes Finn’s heart feel heavy and full.   
“So, uh,” Finn asks. “Are you from D’Qar or-”  
“Yavin Four,” Poe answers. “My parents, they were with the rebellion, when I was small. They left it to care for me and I lived there until I was eight. Kind of similar to here. Warmer, though, but the forests were still good. Less forest in some places than jungle, I guess.”  
“You look like you fit here,” Finn says. “Like it’s your...your natural habitat.”  
Poe smiles, looks over at him. “You look like you belong here, too,” he answers.  
Finn feels himself flush. “Thanks,” he murmurs.  
“You would have liked her,” Poe says. “Mom. She died, when I was eight and Dad went off to chase the Resistance and I joined up. Everyone liked her. Best pilot in the galaxy.”  
“Better than you?” Finn asks.  
Poe smiles. “She taught me everything I know,” he answers. “Probably not everything she knew, but...everything I know. She was great. Cool under pressure and- and just...she made me feel so safe.” He pauses, before shaking his head. “Sorry- I didn’t mean to- I hope I didn’t...I don’t know what you remember of your family and I don’t mean to drag stuff up.”  
“I don’t remember anything,” Finn says. “They take us when we’re newborn, from the hospitals. They do some kind of gene testing, to see who will be fit for service later. I never knew them.” He looks over to Poe. Smiles. “I don’t mind hearing about your family, though. Really.”   
The distance between them fills with the sound of the life in the forest.   
“Most of the nursery work was done by droids,” Finn says. “And training was instructed by humans. I’ve actually never seen so many non-combatant, free non-human sentients in on place before.”  
“You knew slaves?” Poe asks, his brow furrowing.  
“No,” Finn answers. “But I saw them. We did a..there was an...there was a mine. They had mind to be free. Command had other ideas.”  
Silence settles between them.   
“You know that Rey and the General and I- that nobody- none of us blame you, for what you did...before, right?” Poe asks. His voice is low, soft and tender.  
Poe can be so gentle, and it makes something in Finn hurt sometimes.  
He stands, opens the crate underneath him and pulls out a pair of binoculars.  
There’s a rustling in the clearing, as Finn turns around, and a tech that Finn has seen around comes jogging up, followed by about a dozen sweating recruits, of varying ages and heights.  
“Hi,” Poe greets. “So you’ve decided to join the Resistance.”

 


	15. Chapter 15

Watching Finn with the recruits is amazing. 

Poe will tell them everything they need to know- how to blend in, how to fit in at a bar or in a city, how to keep cool in a crisis situation- and he’ll embellish with stories, with data. But Finn, when they pull out the weapons and tarps and ropes to show things, Finn understands how to keep them all engaged, together, at once. He splits them into groups, randomly assigning them and then having them rotate around. And Finn, he flits from place to place, teaching everything. Poe tries to help, he really does, but his experience is fairly limited to blasters- if he needs a shelter, he normally just bunks in his ship, covering it over with a camouflage tarp. Finn, as it happens, is better prepared to teach them how to tie knots and build shelters and Poe is better equipped to teach them how to do the social work of being here, of being useful.

Honestly, Poe learns a lot, too.

“No, no, no,” Finn murmurs. “You want to go  _ under _ , and  _ then _ through and after that around. I know it’s confusing but I think if you practice a few more times, you’ll get it.” 

He’s encouraging and accurate and he remembers all of their names. 

He’s so good at it.

They have the recruits with them for four hours, and when the recruits jog off with the tech, carrying the materials Finn and Poe brought out with them themselves, Poe is exhausted. 

He stretched his shoulders out, feeling the grind between his joints. He groans against it.

“They could probably give you a shot for that,” Finn says, seeing him move. “There a serums that help rebuild cartilage in between joints- if  we were e an efficient they would give them to us to increase efficiency and extend our time in the field. I’m sure resistance doctors have something similar.”   
Poe shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “I fell out of a cockpit years ago and on Jakku I agitated the old injury. Resources are limited and I wouldn’t want to take something someone would really need. I’m fine.”

“Take care of yourself,” Finn says. “If the resources aren’t being used, they aren’t helping anyone.”

They wait a few minutes, to give the recruits the space to head back to main camp before walking off, following them. 

“You’re really good at that,” Poe says. “Instructing them. Normally that training is a couple of days.”

“More efficient that way and they retain the information better. Splitting them into subunits builds camaraderie early but randomizing it prevents the formation of in-groups. It’s easy,” Finn says. 

“It really isn’t,” Poe laughs. “You did a great job. Better than I had and better than I’ve ever done.” 

Finn smiles, looks down at the ground. 

“Thank you,” Finn says, his voice low and hard to hear, so small to be nearly inaudible. 

Poe loves when Finn feels proud of himself. He loves it. 

He wants to make him feel that way for the rest of his life.

* * *

 

Rey is walking from the lake back to the center of base, and where the path converges, she encounters Poe and Finn. 

She hadn’t sensed them at all, she had been so focused, so intently on her exercises from today, and she has the pleasant surprise of not expecting them.

“Hello!” She greets, cheerfully. “How was your day? How was training the new recruits?”

Poe throws his arm over Finn and smiles broadly. “Finn here is a natural! He’s been wasted in the supply room- he should retrain everyone on base’s survival skills.”   
Finn flushes, his dark cheeks heating a pink color. Rey smiles, reflexively. “Really?” She asks. “That’s excellent!”   
“How was training?” Poe asks, brightly.

He seems so warm, so alive in this moment, more energetically of himself than he’s been since Rey’s been here. It’s incredible, and it gives the walk toward base a kind of electric sensation. 

“It went quite well, I think,” Rey answers. “We did awareness exercises today. They were interesting but I’m absolutely exhausted.” She rolls her shoulders, stretching her neck muscles. “You seem chipper,” she comments. “Did you enjoy training?”

Poe smiles, looks down at his shoes- neither of the two of them can apparently smile and hold eye contact at the same time. “Yeah,” he says. “I actually did.”   
Rey feels herself smiling a little more broadly at the statement. 

“Oh!” Finn exclaims. “Do you want to meet us at the bunk with your stuff and help you get settled in, or do you need help gathering your gear yourself?”

Rey blinks a few times. “Oh,” she says. “I can meet you at the bunk. I had forgotten.”

Finn looks _ thrilled.  _ “Excellent!” he says. “I can talk to the SO about getting a spare bed and borrowing a plasma torch; it should all be ready by the time you get back.”   
“Finn,” Poe sighs. “We could just find beds  _ meant _ to stack instead of bringing a torch into it.”

“Oh,” Finn answers. “I...I guess. Yeah. That would be more efficient.”

“I mean,” Poe continues. “If you’re just  _ dying _ to use a plasma torch, we could probably find other things to weld in well ventilated areas.”

Finn grins. “Really?” He asks. “I never got to use them because I wasn’t in engineering or construction and I always wanted to use them- and yeah- yeah, using them in a ventilated space seems like a good idea. Good call. Good call.”

Rey finds herself laughing, happily with them, with the easiness that has settled between them, and that kind of ease and joy follows her through to the Falcon, where she climbs into the racks and grabs her blankets and pillow and staff and walks back toward the center of base.

Toward home. 


	16. Chapter 16

Poe sits down on his bed and sighs, heavily, glad to be back in his room.   
Finn gets in and immediately pulls his blankets and sheets off his bed and then pulls his mattress off his bed, propping it up against the wall. He flips the metal frame of it over, looks at the hardware, and nods to himself.   
“Okay,” he says. “So it looks like these are linked together as units with hexes and I should be able to connect this one to a new one or if you’d rather have a bunked unit rather than a single, I could attach this one to yours and Rey could take the solo unit-”  
“I’d really rather keep my bed to myself,” Poe answers. “If it’s all the same to you. I bang my head on the bottom and fall out of the top.”  
Finn nods. “No problem,” he says. “As long as I’m top bunk, we’re good.”  
Poe grins. “Don’t like the bottom?” He says it and then immediately regrets it. _Come on Dameron_ , he thinks. _What are you, fourteen?_  
“No,” Finn answers. “Don’t like...small spaces. Enclosed spaces. Freak me out.” Mercifully, Finn doesn’t seem to have caught Poe’s dreadful joke. Poe finds himself personally thanking whichever higher authorities he can think of.  
“You need help pulling in a bed kit from the SO?” Poe asks, and Finn nods.  
“I should have no problem with the frame,” he says. “They come bundles and are pretty light, but if you could get the mattress that would make this much easier.”  
Poe nods, slides his legs from his bed to the floor and pulls his boots back on. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”  
He’s still deeply unsure about inviting Rey into this space. He’s still deeply unsure about Finn being here, if he’s being honest with himself.   
Finn makes Poe think of the bright and new green spring seasons. He makes him think, warmly, of a kind of gentleness and warmness, of moving clumsily into life and light. Finn makes Poe feel bright and special and alive, in a way that flying makes him feel. Finn is beautiful- his dark, clear skin and full lips and clear, dark eyes. His well built and competent body, alert but confident in all these things he does.  
Poe has felt an undeniable pull towards Finn since he met him, and the thought that here, in his own bunk, Poe must be obliged to make space for Rey (who is vital and cool and strong- a spring, an oasis, in a desert- a proof of life where none was before), who will take Finn away from him, in his own space makes something twist uncomfortably in his stomach.  
But this will make Finn happy, and if it would make Finn happy, Poe thinks he’d do anything in the galaxy.


	17. Chapter 17

Poe is helping Finn hold a support steady while he screws a hex-screw in place when Rey walks into the room with a smal duffle bag and a blanket slung over her shoulder. 

"That everything?" Poe asks, trying his hardest to not sound somehow surprised or judgemental, to keep that feeling of shock out of his voice.

Rey nods. "I couldn't go back," she says. "To get my things, on Jakku. This was most of it anyway but- I wish- it wasn't a lot but it was...mine." She pauses. "It's probably all been picked over, anyway, by the other scavengers. Hope the rations and oil at least go to someone who needs it."

"Did you stockpile?" Poe asks. 

Rey nods. "For the storming season, when you can't leave shelter without the sand blowing you away." She shrugs her bag off of her shoulder, letting it fall on the floor with a dense plop. "And sometimes you can't find any of the good parts, and that time can last for a long time." 

She squats down next to Poe, steadying the support further. "I remember, once, there was a spate of weeks where I couldn't get any portions in parts- before I started picking through the Destroyers. I think I lived off six portions for four weeks.” 

Finn finishes driving the screw. 

"Okay," Finn says. "Three more."

They work together quickly but with little conversation. Finn isn't great at talking while doing anything else, his focus laser sharp and distinct, and unless Finn is talking, Rey is naturally taciturn and Poe, himself, is feeling a quietness from exhaustion.

He’s also feeling a need to  _ think _ , to process this awful information given to him. 

He thinks about Rey starving.

They get the posts screwed together and then they begin work on the frame to hold the mattress, which requires more logistical talking and Rey taking charge of the wrench, her light frame making it easier for her to stretch and climb and clamber in the awkward positions necessary to screw the mattress supports together. 

“We should have attached this first and then attached the bottom,”  she murmurs, midway through the third screw on the third leg.

“The instructions specified this order,” Finn says, frowning. 

Poe exhales a short laugh. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Poe says. “The order’s not crucial on this kind of thing, Finn, and Rey, we’ll be done soon.”

And they are, done soon. And they flop mattresses back down into the frame and Rey tosses her blanket over the bed and Poe rearranges his objects in his drawers for Rey and Finn’s things and he observes the easy, comfortable. BB-8 wheels in and makes a kind of contented, pleased sound before rolling over to her charging port and settling down, pleased. 

“I’m going to go to the ‘fresher,” Poe announces. “I smell like eight kinds of grease.”

“Okay,” Finn answers. “Do you want me to grab something from the mess for you?”

Poe shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “I’m fine.”

“Did you eat dinner?” Finn asks.

“I’m fine,” Poe says, over his shoulder, walking out.

He grabs a towel from the racks and his toiletries from his cubby and heads for a far stall. It’s a weird time- because most people are grabbing dinner, the room is empty. He turns it on and there’s a wealth of hot water, a little bit  _ too _ hot, hitting his skin and opening his pores and rinsing away the grease.

Poe squirts a gob of soap from his bottle and lathers some of it through his thick hair and scrubs some of it over his chest and shoulders, letting his hands and fingers roam over his body. Letting him touch himself. 

It’s been...weeks. Finn’s been in the room and when Finn’s not there, BB-8’s there, observing him closely. Poe hates doing this when there’s other people around, something to it feels dishonorable unsporting. He’d hate for someone else to do the same thing with him in the room, so he doesn’t do it with other people in the room 

Poe lets the hot water roll over his body and then lets his hand drift over his hips, a little lower, lets his thumb drift over and under, lets his hand easily, naturally, enclose the length of his dick. 

He groans, stroking himself easily.

He thinks of Finn’s beautiful eyes, his full lips. He thinks of his careful, competent hands. He thinks of the way he moves, his body unweighted by armor. 

He thinks of Rey’s clear voice and her freckles over her nose and under her eyes. Her messy hair, escaping looped buns. The way she moves with swaying steps, not used used to balancing on ground that doesn’t shift under her feet.

He thinks of the possibility of  _ touching _ them and he feels his heart speed. 

Poe touches himself to the thought of wanting.

* * *

 

Rey is in the mess hall and suddenly turns bright, lurid red, all the way to the roots of her hair. 

She drops her spoon and hides her face in her hands. 

“I-” She says, suddenly. “I need to- I need to get some air. Could you-”

“Yeah,” Finn says. “Are you okay?”

Rey nods, standing suddenly before practically  _ jogging _ out of the mess.

Finn watches her go, baffled. 

He’s never seen her not finish food before.

* * *

 

She’s better about not hearing unintentionally. Master Skywalker has helped her a lot with that. But suddenly something bursts through, a warmth, a- a heat.

A strong heavy feeling.

Poe, she realizes. Poe, he’s feeling warm and... _ electric _ and he’s thinking of-

He’s thinking of her.

Rey jogs past the refresher with a serious streak of determination, jogs up the path of the wood and finds a tall tree with wide, sturdy branches.

She climbs, quickly, easily, about sixty feet into the air and sits on a branch, her back against the high trunk of the tree and tries to breathe through the sensation of it. 

It builds, though. It keeps happening, keeps surging through her, washing over her. 

She feels a sensation- like shifting into hyperdrive but all through her body- bright and huge and all over. She cries out, with it, with the sudden quality of it, with the intensity of it. 

Rey feels everything. 

And somehow, Poe made her feel it.

 


	18. Chapter 18

Poe wraps the towel around his waist after he rubs the water of his hair. He runs his fingers through his hair and gathers his laundry in his arms. He sticks his head out of the refresher and looks across the base. 

It’s just a short das of a few meters from here to the bunks. Everyone is eating. No one is there. 

Holding his clothes, Poe jogs from the refresher to the bunks and slips through the port quickly. Goes down the hallway and steps into his room.

Where Finn is standing in the middle of the room with two covered plates and a puzzled look on his face. 

“Oh!” Poe exclaims.

“Oh!” Finn shouts, at the same time, “Oh, I can leave, I’m sorry, I thought-”

“I thought you’d be eating with Rey,” Poe says, clutching at the towel at his hips, gritting his teeth. 

“She ran off and I-” Finn places the covered plates on the small desk against a far wall. “I’ll just go, I’m sorry.”

And Finn steps out of the room and Poe stands there, wet, naked, and embarrassed. 

Poe sighs, heavily. Drops the towel and opens his drawers. 

The door opens to the bunk again and he hears a voice say, “OH!” 

“ _ Kriff!” _ Poe exclaims, covering his cock with a wad of underwear, turning around just enough to catch sight of Rey rushing out of the door.

“Seven  _ hells _ ,” Poe swears, tugging on his boxers before he rests his arms on his dresser and then his head on his arms.

There’s a knock on the door.

Poe exhales. 

“Come in!” He replies, groaning. 

The door opens and Rey steps in, her face pink. 

“Hey, Rey,” Poe says. 

“H-hello,” Rey replies. “I needed to grab my- I needed to- I thought maybe you’d be in-”

“It’s okay,” Poe says. “I’m just getting used to there being more people in here. I haven’t shared a bunk since I was a cadet and I forgot that- these things happen. You probably just saw my butt, and if we’re being honest, most of base has seen that.”

Rey pauses, her cheeks turning a little darker. “You have...quite a nice butt,” she says. 

Poe feels his own face heat. He feels his gaze drift from her to the floor. “Most of base would agree with you, actually,” he says, feeling a nervous kind of laugh bubble out of himself. 

“Your hair,” Rey says softly. She steps forward, into the room, into Poe’s space. Poe keeps his head down, so she can see the crown of it. She reaches forward and Poe feels, electrically, her fingers touch his curly hair. “Your hair, it’s… faded.”

Poe reaches up, finds her fingers in his hair. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah, going grey early in the family is hereditary and with flying and then the stress- I’m...yeah. Normally it gets hidden under all the other hair but, with it just cleaned, it’s easy to see. I’ll be old enough soon for it to be nothing special.”

“It’s pretty,” she says. “Twilight colored. The only people on Jakku I saw with hair like this, they had been dried up by the desert. Dying. You’re so alive.”

This close to her, Poe can smell her, smell the forest, the woods. The lakewater. Something like lightning and something earthy and organic and physical. He can feel the heat from her body, or maybe he just imagines he can. Hopes he can.

He feels naked before her, and not just because he’s not wearing any clothes.

“You and Finn, you’re more alive than that whole graveyard world,” she says.

Poe looks up, their hands drift away, drift apart, and he just- 

He just sees her, there. 

Cheeks flushed, vulnerable. 

The subject of his thoughts. 

She pulls away though. 

“I’m just gonna- gonna get dressed here,” Poe says and Rey walks out of the door.


	19. Chapter 19

Finn’s cleaning and reconstructing a blaster (debris from being off planet was affecting the sights and Finn’s pretty sure that not a single person in the resistance knows how to clean and rebuild their weapons- he makes a mental note to add that to the training) when Rey practically runs into the room and sits down across the bench from him.   
Finn looks up from where he’s running a no-static swab over the crystal to see her look flushed and embarrassed.  
He puts down the swab. He doesn’t say anything, but he does wait.   
Rey doesn’t like to be caged in- to be trapped- by anything, including conversations. Finn knows he’ll hear more from her if she starts the conversation.   
“Something...happened,” Rey murmurs, her voice barely above a whisper.  
Finn raises an eyebrow.   
“I- Poe- he-”  
Finn feels his heart sink, but he holds his silence while Rey continues.  
“He’s so...alive,” Rey says. “He’s like a whole, living system, a whole world, and I saw him but we kept talking and then I touched him and he touched me, touching him and I want to touch him more.” She stops. “Master Skywalker told me about...attachment. And how it can lead to the dark side and I don’t want to hurt him or you but I want the both of you-”  
“You want me?” Finn asks, feeling a thrill inside of himself, that hope in himself roaring alive again. He stops. “Sorry- sorry. Continue.”  
Rey sighs. “I want you and Poe, a lot, but I’m worried that I’d be too much, that I would get too attached and that I would, that I’d hurt you or other people.” Finn sees her jaw clench. “I can’t hurt people. I can’t hurt you,” she says.  
“I-” Finn starts, and then stops. “I don’t think...I’m not sure I can be helpful to you. They never let us form any relationships when we were in barracks. Nothing romantic or sexual- nothing. I don’t know anything about this. But I think that you really care about this and about other people and that’s important so…I just don’t know.”  
Finn reaches his hand out and Rey takes it.  
She looks worried. She looks scared.   
“I want more,” she says. “I’m scared that I’m not supposed to want more. I’m scared that he doesn’t want more, too.”  
“Being scared is okay,” Finn says.  
Rey sinks into her crossed arms, with Finn holding her hand. They sit there, for a long time.


	20. Chapter 20

Poe lays in bed, wearing just his boxers and undershirt, looking up at his ceiling.   
It’s been hours, and it’s still just him in here.   
He’s just there, by himself.  
He throws an arm over his eyes and takes a deep, uneven breath, his air catching inside himself.  
“I did something wrong,” he whispers. “What did I do?”  
There’s a low sound, a motor activating. BB-8 rolls from her charging port over to Poe’s bedside. She makes a sound- long string of binary.   
Poe slips out of bed, his blanket around his shoulders.   
He leans against her, her casing cool and whirring. The casing quickly warms, absorbing Poe’s body heat.   
BB-8 starts performing a subroutine, one she built herself, from hearing Poe hum to himself while in flight. A song Poe’s mother sang, when he was small, a song Poe’s grandmother sang while working fields- a song from the Republic that had been.   
She’s little, and a droid, but she’s also emotionally receptive. BB-8 has a way of caring, the way the General’s protocol droid does and the old astromech have a strange, fullsome receptiveness and emotionality. BB-8 is unusual- most of the pilots just use whatever mech is available and let them charge in the ports at the supply office. But there’s something about BB-8, about how little she is or her tone or her humor- something about her that made Poe know that she was meant to be treasured.  
Being a pilot means that Poe knows his days are numbered, always numbered. Every mission might be his last mission- Jakku was so close to his last mission- and Poe knows that he can’t not come home to someone, to a child. He can’t do to a child what his family did to him.   
BB-8 is his little girl.  
Damn, does she take care of him.  
She finishes the song and then beeps out a question- _Poe sleep better in cockpit?_  
Poe smiles. “Nah,” he says. “I’ll be alright. Just- trouble sleeping tonight. I’m okay.”  
BB-8 chirps out an affirmation and then begins to name the stars visible from Yavin-4, another of Poe’s nervous habits she’s learned, her small voice containing a whole system.

* * *

  
Rey holds Finn’s hand for a long time, and then she gets up, wipes her face, and dashes off.  
Finn watches her go, and then he finishes cleaning and re-assembling the blaster. Finn looks at it, switched it on and then off and then puts it back in the rack with the other ones.   
He gets up, his back twinging from sitting so long. He walks from the supply office back to the barracks. Walks in slowly and quietly.   
Poe is on the floor, leaning against BB-8, who is separate from her charging dock, softly and rhythmically beeping. Poe is wrapped in a blanket.   
Finn feels that weird fluttering sensation in his chest, in his heart.   
He wants him. He wants Rey, too.   
They are so different from everyone Finn knew before- so bright and expressive and tough and alive. They’re alive and they make him feel alive.  
He climbs into his own bunk, and from there, he watches Poe sleep and listens to BB-8 speak.


	21. Chapter 21

Rey climbs the tree near the lake, pulls herself up into the highest, tallest branch she can find, and she looks out from the tree into the darkness. The sky is cloudy, such that the stars are obscured. She’s far enough away from the lights of the base that it’s become pitch dark- she can’t see anything. 

It’s just her here, herself in the darkness. 

She must have been with Finn for three or four hours, just holding his hand, drifting comfortably in the energy of being there. Finn’s consciousness nearby, a balm to her. 

She wants to be near them, but she can’t help but feel that she somehow, already, got too close.

She sits up there and closes her eyes, stretches her own consciousness outward, as far out as she can go- from the base into the woods and from the woods to plains and mountains and valleys that surround its edges nearby. She feels the life of the plants, of the animals, of the people. She feels the handful of farmers and villagers far out from the base- she realizes, here for the first time, how truly remote they are here from the rest of the planet- she new this system was sparsely populated and removed from the teeming systems toward the center of the galaxy- this world has far more in common with Jakku than the ecosystem might have led her to believe at first. 

She begins to filter, to focus. She pulls her mind away from the plains and mountains and valleys- first from the plants and then from the animals and then from the every glowing sentient mind. She pulls herself more and more away, limits the scope further and further, until it is just her, here, in this tree, the only glowing light. 

She focuses on that. She focuses on the that glowing light, of that sensation of connection. She feels it as a connection to everything, to a whole world, to a whole system, to a whole galaxy. She feels it as a connection to every living thing, to every other bright light in an enormous galaxy composed of bright lights.

And she feels the connection between herself and Finn and Poe.

They’re both sleeping at this point, restful and real sleep. She smiles, to think of them. 

Bright lights. 

She pulls herself backward, to the light here with herself.

When she opens her eyes again, the sun is rising and Master Skywalker is sitting on a branch nearby. 

“You didn’t sleep last night,” Master Skywalker says. 

“I don’t think you did either,” Rey answers.

Neither of them say anything for a while, the world waking up around them- the birds in the trees flitting and chirping, the sound of engines activating not too distant. 

“I’m scared that because I want them, I’m going to hurt them,” Rey says. “And I’m scared because- because you’re teaching me so much about this...power inside me and it’s so  _ big _ and I’m so scared of it because I know that it  _ could _ hurt them. I’m scared of hurting them and hurting anyone.”

Master Skywalker doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then he sighs. “That sounds like a serious quandry,” he says. “I think that fear...I think that’s part of why the old code existed.” 

He pauses again. 

An X-Wing roars into flight behind them and then rushes away overhead, fading into space. 

“Do you miss flying?” Rey asks.

“Every day,” Master Skywalker answers. “I’ve been talking to the General about getting back into the cockpit with Artoo. It was the only thing I was good at, when I was on Tattooine.”

They hold the silence together a little longer, and then he says, “I think asking those questions is important,” he says. “I think that because you’re asking these questions, you’re going to make decisions that won’t hurt them. Or you’re not going to try to. I meant what I said, at the old temple. I trust you to make decisions, Rey.”

“Thank you, Master Skywalker,” she says. 

“No training today, Rey,” he says. “You spent the night meditating- I felt your work from my quarters. Very subtle. Take a rest day.”

“Thank you, Master Skywalker,” Rey replies.

* * *

 

Poe hears the door open, and it’s enough to wake him up. He feels his eyes flit open for a bare second, and sees Rey slip from the hall into the room. She tugs off her boots and shrugs out of her jacket- used to be  _ Poe’s _ jacket and then it was  _ Finn’s _ . She’s wearing a shirt she stole from Poe and a pair of green pants from the supply officer. She unties her hair from the three buns she keeps it in. It falls over her shoulders, to the small of her back. Her hair is far longer than he thought it had been. Her skinny, flat feet are bare. 

She glances over, and notices him.

She smiles, all the way to her bright eyes. 

On impulse, Poe pulls his arm outward, inviting. 

She smiles a little more broadly and snatches the pillow from her bed. She walks over and sits down on the pillow, beside him. Poe closes his arm around her, pulling the blanket over her. 

She pulls in close to him, rests her head on his shoulder. 

Poe falls back asleep.

 


	22. Chapter 22

When Finn wakes up, he sees from the top of his bunk that Rey has come in and she’s joined Poe on the floor.

He finds himself smiling.

Apparently, Rey has sorted out her ethical issue. 

He grabs his pillow and tosses it down from the top of the bunk. He climbs down, easily, and sits down, on his pillow, next to Rey. He lays his head on her shoulder (boney) and lets his eyes drift closed.

* * *

BB-8 activates her morning subroutine, a little more quietly than usual, but active nonetheless.

_ Good morning _ , she chirps, and then lets own the correct series of binary blips and chirps to indicate the time and date, and then chirps that  _ Today has been designated a rest day by General Organa! _

Poe yawns. rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. “Thank you, BB,” he says, and beside him, Rey shifts awake and beside her, Finn also blinks into being awake.

And Poe feels... _ panic _ seize him.

He sits up, totally, and tries for the right series of whistles that would activate the lights.

BB-8 makes a small  _ growl _ and then the correct series of sounds to activate the lights. Poe smiles. BB-8 once made an indication to the rough meaning that Poe’s  _ accent _ in droid-binary was thick enough to be unintelligible if not outright offensive. He doesn’t do this often, but the small irritation it causes for BB-8 cracks Poe up enormously, every time. 

“Thanks, BB,” he says. He stands up and tugs on a pair of sweatpants. 

He notices, as he looks over at them, that Rey and Finn are holding hands.

“I’m uh-” He says. “I’m uh, gonna go grab some...some breakfast.” 

He loves Rey and he loves Finn and he loves both of them and- and he can’t help but to feel-

Despite the rumors on base-

What the pilots say-

Poe- he’s not normally-

Poe loves people. Loves them. 

He remembers his mother- her voice, her hands, her hair. Teaching him to fly. 

He remembers Flynn Edgecaster- pilot in one of his first units. Remembers the jokes he’d make on base and how steady his voice was in the sky. Remembers how his hair would stand up when he took off his helmet- Poe still has holos of that. He remembers Flynn dying, killed by a First Order Raid, mere hours after Poe kissed him- his first kiss. 

He remembers Flynn and Horace and Delia and Mara and Jana and Mierial and Daven and Jacen. 

He remembers them. 

Poe loves people but he’s never had so much  _ time _ with someone. He’s never had time for more than rushed kisses, a fast fuck in the ‘fresher, maybe a few conversations before someone was killed or disappeared or was transferred to a new base, to be killed or disappeared at the other edge of the galaxy. 

Poe’s never gotten to start a relationship, and he doesn’t know  _ how _ , much less with two people who make him feel like every part of him has become lit up by stars, with stars. 

He thinks of the murmuring of BB-8, her small voice gently enumerating the stars. 

Poe doesn’t know what to do. 

He grabs a few fruits from the mess and a few cups of caf. 

He walks back toward the bunks.

 


	23. Chapter 23

Poe walks into his room ( _ their room _ ?) and Finn is folding a blanket and Rey is adjusting something on BB-8 and murmuring about the antenna. 

“Good Morning,” Poe greets. He places the fruit and caf on the desk and grabs a cup and a piece of fruit. 

“Morning,” Finn greets. He places the folded blanket across the foot of Poe’s bed- Rey’s and Finn’s own already have their own blankets. 

“Good Morning,” Rey greets herself, standing and biting into a piece of fruit. “I want to be in a relationship with you. And Finn. Both of you.”

She says it casually, offhand. 

“I’ve already talked to Finn about it,” she continues. “And he wants this as well. I think you do, also, but I might be unsure. But I want you and Finn and me- I want  _ us. _ ”

Poe looks over from Rey to Finn, who is turning flushed bright at his cheeks. 

“I want this, too,” Finn says. He pauses, his jaw clenching. “You make me feel like a living thing and not just a- a part. Of a machine.”

Poe sits down and looks at both of them. “I’ve never been part of a real...of a serious relationship before,” he says. “Pilots have short life expectancies and anyone who might have... I always outlived them.” He bites his lip. “I might not come back one day.”

Rey sits down on Poe’s bunk, crosses her legs neatly in front of her. “I know,” she says. “I might not either. Or Finn. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do this. Or try.”

“I can’t hurt you, like that,” Poe says. “My parents...they never came back.”

“I don’t need you to protect my feelings,” Finn says. 

“Me either,” Rey says. 

Poe runs his fingers through his hair. “It’s not just your feelings, okay?” Poe says. “It’s me- it’s me, what if something- I can’t leave you like that and I can’t- if I buried you or if I lost- lost you. I can’t. For you...for...me.”

Rey drapes her arms over her knees, pulling them to her chest. She has a serious expression over her face, grim. 

“You hold people at arm’s length because you’re scared of hurting them,” Rey murmurs. 

“They didn’t come home,” Poe says, and he tries to hold his voice still the right way, to keep that broken thing inside of him still. 

He hasn’t been sleeping enough. 

“I promised,” he says. “I promised I wouldn’t do that to someone else.”

Finn is standing, his arms crossed, looking at his feet. “Poe,” he says, “if you don’t come home and I’ve never- you’ve never- we’ve... _ together _ , if we’ve never...that would...Poe, I’m here. Rey’s here. We know the risks. And we wouldn’t...I know that it’s a big galaxy and there’s a lot to be afraid of. But I feel like I just started living my life and I want you to be a part of it. I want you to be here with it.”

“What about...what if I hurt you?” Poe asks. 

“What if I hurt you?” Rey asks. 

Poe stands. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry I just...I need to think. I’ll be...around.”

He grabs a jacket and walks out the door.

He walks and walks and keeps walking- heading out deeper and further into the woods away from base.

“Commander Dameron,” Poe hears as he’s crossing the dirt-paved corridor. 

Poe turns, and Master Skywalker is there. 

“Master Skywalker,” Poe greets. “Good morning.”

He nods. “How have you been sleeping?” he asks.

Poe pauses, suddenly regretting not having caf with him.

“Uh,” Poe says, “Better than it was but it’s still rough. I had trouble falling out last night.”

Master Skywalker nods, sagely ( _ does he do anything that isn’t sagely? _ ). “You should know that this is normal, that sleeplessness is a normal response to stress,” he says. 

Poe feels himself flush. “Thank you, Master Skywalker,” he says. “Doctor Kalonia always just tells me that I should actually sleep more and makes me feel guilty for not getting any rest.”

“I suppose she says that because you don’t get any rest and then take on more work, if what my sister tells me is true,” he replies.

Poe suddenly sees a lot of Master Skywalker in Rey. 

“Master Skywalker,” he says. “Could I ask you a few questions? Pilot to Pilot?”   
Master Skywalker’s cheeks seem to heat up. “Of course,” he says. There’s an edge of joy to his tone, a kind of happiness. 

“What if I don’t come home?” he asks. “It’s a real possibility, I know, and I’m worried that...when I don’t come home...I guess,  _ if _   I don’t come back, I’ll hurt people. I know I’ll hurt people. What if I just don’t-”

“You don’t have relationships at all?” Master Skywalker interrupts. 

“Well,” Poe says, “Yes.”

“But what if you do come home, every time,” he says. “What if you live through the war? What if you see the Republic, the Resistance successful? What then? What if you live through it and then you die, peacefully, normally, in a home all your own?”

Poe looks at Master Skywalker for a long time, and then Master Skywalker shrugs. 

Master Skywalker walks away. 

Poe watches him go, and then he runs, back to the base.


	24. Chapter 24

Rey and Finn sit in the room, in the aftermath of it.  
Rey is still sitting on Poe’s bed, the one Finn made for him, fixed up for him, made clean and regulation for him. She sits there in clothes that are too big for her, borrowed and stolen from someone else. Her eyes are wide and worried.  
“I don’t understand,” she says.   
Finn gathers her meaning more or less immediately.   
“They didn’t let us see each other without the armor,” Finn says. “Refreshers were constructed with utmost privacy and we undressed at light’s out. “Discouraged attachment, prejudice, fraternization, identification with the officer class. They start enforcing it seriously when you’re about thirteen. More serious rations holds and corporal punishments as repercussions. You get used to it, is the thing. It becomes so...easy and normal. Saw everything out of a helmet.”   
Rey closes her eyes, and Finn can see the way she rides through that information, feels something deeper there.   
“So many people but all alone,” she whispers.  
“Yeah,” Finn says.  
“You don’t like small spaces,” Rey says.  
“I don’t like being trapped,” Finn replies. “I spent my whole life in a cage, all alone. I don’t understand not wanting touch or be. Time is short. Crazy short. I’m ready to be happy.”  
Rey looks up at him and smiles, her expression soft and fond. She’s worrying the edge of her clothes in her fingers.  
“I had a bigger cage,” she says.  
Finn sits down on Poe’s bunk, beside her, and bends to rest his head on her shoulder. Takes her hand in his. Closes his eyes and doesn’t quite dream and doesn’t quite stay awake.

* * *

  
Finn is dozing softly, resting on her, when Poe walks in, maybe an hour later.  
"Hi," he says. "I have some...damage."  
He looks absolutely wrecked. He's wearing weeks of sleeplessness, badly. He's still wearing the clothes he slept in, but now they are flecked with dew and mud at burrs from the wood. His hair is a mess, tangled through with branches. The knee of his pants is torn and his knee is bleeding.  
"I should say so," Rey says, assessing him.  
Poe looks down at himself. "What, this?" He asks. "No, this is nothing. Not a thing. No- I mean- I mean I've got...some experiences I've been through and they make me...antsy and strange, especially about things like relationships. And that's not fair to you, I think. I want this, a lot. So much. But I'm worried that the mortal realities of what I do would make me to hurt you." He bites his lip, and there is something so sensual to that physical action, so beautiful that it makes something of Rey flutter warmly.  
"I'm my own worst enemy," Poe says. "I call it 'survival brain' but Kalonia calls it 'anxiety.' It sometimes keeps me from getting shot but mostly it means I obsess over little shit and isolate the people around me. I'm sorry I did that to you."   
He pauses for a moment, his body a lean line across the doorway. "I don't want to be alone. If you'd have me, I think I'd like to be not alone with you and Finn."  
"I think," Rey answers, "we could do that."


	25. Chapter 25

  
Poe’s hands stutter. Rey thinks that maybe he doesn’t realize that she notices, but his hands move in a way that Rey knows can only be adequately explained as stuttering. They shake forward, nervously, draw forward and then draw back. She notices that he does it not only when he’s with them; he does it when repairing sometimes or when he’s eating.   
She’s seen him go up for a few short flights- basic scouting runs- and she never sees that kind of hesitation in him when he’s in the cockpit, she can never read doubt in what he’s doing when he’s flying or when he’s talking about flying.   
Poe never doubts himself suspended in the air like he doubts himself bounded by the ground, and Rey cannot help but see it, constantly.  
“I-I-I’m sorry,” Poe says, sitting down next to her on his own bunk. “I’m sorry.”  
“Why?” Rey asks, as his hand stammers across space to rest on her own.  
“I don’t know,” Poe answers.  
In her lap, Finn opens his eyes and blinks awake. She sees the way his gaze drifts from her face to Poe’s, from her eyes to his.  
“You haven’t been sleeping,” Finn says.  
Poe nods.  
“That made you sick, before,” Finn continues.  
Poe nods again.  
“You can’t get sick again,” Finn says. “It was so foolish the last time you did that.”  
Poe sighs. Rey feels his head roll slowly onto her shoulder, rest there heavy and warm.  
“When we were in training, they did a week where we trained for capture,” Poe says. “I opted out of the...the dentistry that would give us an option if the pain ever became too much or the interrogators too zealous. I never regretted it- and I’ve been captured a few times- until I was on the Finalizer.”  
The room is quiet for a long, long time, and then Finn says, softly, “You’ve been captured before?”  
Poe shrugs. “Crash landed in unfriendly territory, some thug thought that she could rough me up. Took forever for my fingernails to grow back. And there was the time the treaty agreements didn’t go right and the time I got kidnapped- nothing major. Most pilots have at least one story like it.”  
“They never trained us to withstand torture,” Finn says. “We were just never supposed to be captured. And if we were, we knew that we’d never be recovered so why...why live?” Finn’s hands tighten slightly where they grip Rey’s thigh. “No captured troopers, and if you were, there was always a pill, in the helmet. In case.”  
Rey feels very small, suddenly, flanked by two weary war heroes, resting on her.  
“We had no idea where they kept getting them,” Poe murmurs.   
“What did he...did he take, from you?” Rey asks, and her voice does not feel very brave, in that instant.  
Poe’s eyes, which normally look heavy and relaxed and easy, slide closed. His brow furrows.   
“I thought I’d never be happy again,” he says. “And I forgot I ever had been. Made me feel heavy and broken. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t catch the air.” He speaks in a halting voice, slowly. “It burned, like drowning burns.”  
It’s not until she feels him squeeze that she realizes she is holding Poe’s hand.  
“It feels different in the dream. Less about my mom and more about you and Finn,” he says. “Scares me so bad. Easier to be brain dead than to be terrified all night.”  
Rey holds his hand and rests her other on Finn’s shoulder.   
“Don’t do it alone,” she says, after a while. “You don’t have to do it alone.”


	26. Chapter 26

_Poe is strapped down, to the chair again. He can feel it- feel the bonds against his wrists and ankles and knees. It’s immediately like the training and totally different. Already he is full of thunder._   
_Black gloved-hand, reaching forward. Reaching inside. Poe, as if outside of himself, sees it sink into his face as he feels it tear and rend._   
_But he also feels something cool and soft and light- something reassuring, somehow._   
_Poe feels his eyes (bulging from their sockets and held captive by pain) drift to the right of himself, where he sees something blue and calm and serene fall over. He feels it wash over himself, a wave of feeling, pushing into every corner of the room and further outward, freeing him from his bonds and stripping the image of the room away. Poe feels it disappear, leaving coolness and comfort and softness in its wake._   
_Poe feels._

* * *

  
Finn watches Poe wake up slowly.   
It starts in his shoulders, which go from slumped and lax to stretching, all of the sudden. The wakefulness, it extends into his neck and then the features of his face, shifting from utterly still to composed of contentment, lips barely turned upward, brow easy and relaxed. His eyes open easily, steadily, instead of in an uncomfortable flutter or shock. Poe wakes up in a soft way, like some creature fully realizing something hidden deep inside.  
Beside Poe, sheltering him, is Rey, who is still fast asleep, her usually taught expression smooth and unfettered.  
Sleep frees them, Finn realizes, and makes them as weightless as they are when they fly.  
Poe’s eyes are dark brown, the color of tree bark or soil- something nourishing and vital and alive. His eyes are soft, still tired but lacking that sense of hopelessness that has been clinging to him like a bad odor for the past weeks.   
Finn lays a finger to his own lips- _shhh_ \- and points up to Rey. Poe nods.  
From this angle, with Poe above him, Finn can see the details of him, how the sharp shapes of his jaw and cheek and nose catch the light. The sharpness of those features are so strangely offset by how wide and round and big his eyes are, by how they smile.   
There is no cruelty to Poe’s features, even though the shape of them want to recommend it to him. Everything warmth. Everything care.   
Poe moves from Rey’s shoulder, and gestures vaguely that Finn should sit up. He does, and the shift of weight rouses Rey momentarily.   
“Hush,” Poe whispers. His high, clean voice is sleep rough and quiet as he says it. “Just gonna get you more comfortable.”  
He gently eases Rey down onto the bed, horizontal. Finn stands slowly, and they pull the blanket over her, leaving Finn and Poe standing out of the bed, Rey looking surprisingly small and vulnerable with the sheets pulled to her chin.  
Poe looks at her fondly, asleep in his own bed, before he grabs a sweater and steps out of the room.  
Finn watches the space where he left for a few moments before he follows after him.


	27. Chapter 27

Outside, Poe leans against a small retaining wall, arms crossed over his chest. He kicks at the dirt, idly. It became day, while they dozed in Rey’s embrace, and the base is active but not quite busy- people drift from the mess to the bunkers but no ships fly out and there is no urgency to anyone’s movements.   
Any of the ease that had been built into Poe’s body in the room has flowed out, and he looks tense again. Worried.  
“She needs to sleep too,” Poe says to Finn. “And I can’t help but get this feeling that she’s not really sleeping when I’m there. Between last night and right now, I’m pretty good. Should let her rest.” He smiles, roguishly. “I’ll take care of myself, I promise, I just can’t let her get hurt over me and I know her master works her hard.”  
“You think?” Finn asks.   
Poe nods. “Yeah,” he answers. “That Jedi stuff- it’s no joke. I remember when Ben- Kylo- when... _he_ first started how tired it made him.”  
“You knew him?” Finn hears from nearby, and they turn, and Master Skywalker is there.  
Poe ducks his head, immediately. Embarrassed.  
There’s silence, before Master Skywalker says, “It hurt, what he did, but I’m not angry at you for remembering,” he says. “You have the right to remember him and to talk about him.”  
“He was your student,” Poe answers. “And your nephew before that. I just remember him as some kid I knew on the base who I played with, just-”  
“A friend,” Master Skywalker interrupts.   
Poe’s jaw clenches, and he nods.  
Master Skywalker looks so tired.  
“I failed Ben,” Luke says. “I am still not sure how, but people do not turn to the darkness when they feel fulfilled by the light. That is not your failure, Poe, and while my failure has hurt you, I cannot begrudge you your comparisons or conversations. Neither, I think, would my sister.”  
There is silence between all three of them for a long while.   
“You and the General, you’ve hurt enough,” Poe says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the both of you when you don’t realize that he made his own decisions.” Poe frowns, and he does not quite storm off, but there’s quite a lot of urgency in how he walks.  
Master Skywalker watches him go, and then he turns to Finn. Looks at him with his clear but strong and strange eyes.   
“Poe is a lot like his parents,” he comments, almost offhandedly. “Protective to a fault. I wish he were not so intent on hurting himself.”  
“Me too,” Finn answers.   
“You’re Finn,” he says. “Rey told me you were a stormtrooper.”  
“Yes, sir,” Finn says, something of panic making him default to parade rest and standard responses.  
“When I was your age, it was the Empire and not the First Order, and they took us when we were teenagers and not babies,” he says. “I wanted nothing more than to join the academy. I think if my uncle had been a weaker man I might have.”  
Finn feels his eyebrows raise, of their own volition. He’s not good at hiding his thought on his face yet- his helmet did it for him for so much of his life.   
“I would have lead a very different life, I think,” Master Skywalker muses. “Maybe a happier one, even.”  
Finn nods, still slightly shocked.   
“They seem much more dangerous than they were, so many years ago,” he continues. “Ruthless. Rey told me you were strong and I am inclined to believe her.”  
As his cheeks flush, Finn says, “I think Rey could actually deadlift me over her head, for what it’s worth, sir. I’m very glad the Resistance seems to be feeding her enough at last.”  
“She speaks very highly of you,” he says. “She did not tell me you were force sensitive as well.”  
Finn looks at him, at his assessing but surprisingly mischievous features- here Finn can see his relation to the General with complete clarity.   
“Well,” Finn says, “Sir, that’s because I’m not.”  
“Oh,” Master Skywalker says. “I must be mistaken.” He smiles. “Perhaps you could come to training with Rey though, to humor an old man?”  
And Finn nods, as Master Skywalker nods back, and walks toward the mess, probably to get breakfast. 


	28. Chapter 28

When Rey wakes up, there’s no one in the quarters, but she has been laid horizontally across Poe’s bed and draped with his blanket, which feels worn and soft. Used, in a way that hers does not. She pulls it closer to herself and lets its material be soft near her mouth and nose. Poe’s mattress is also softer, like maybe there is something underneath it or on top of it. 

She’s not sure how long she was asleep, but she knows that some time has wavered by- the light is the color of late afternoon, which means that she slept most of the day away. 

She looks at the room a little more- she loves moments like this when Poe’s not here and Finn’s not here and she can just see the way they’ve been here, with each other, in this space. 

Poe’s helmet is kind of like BB-8; technically, property of the resistance writ large, but both come everywhere with him instead of staying with the SO or with the other ships. Poe’s ship is strange too- the custom paint spreading more than a few personal symbols or a line or two of script. 

Poe lives to mark things, for them to be his own. His shirts have his name in them; he uses soaps and other hygienic products he buys offworld, unlike the other people in the resistance who just use the standard issue. He adds more salt, more oil, more sauce, more spices to his food than anyone.

Poe’s helmet sits on a shelf, next to a series of small models of ships and a collection of inactive holo projectors. Flight manuals join it with assorted rocks. There’s a plant, stuck in its own collection of dirt.

Rey thinks with a pang of the flower she stole from a trader on Jakku, how it shriveled no matter how much water she went thirsty to give it, its color fading as it shrank more and more into itself. 

She sits up. Rolls her shoulders and neck, and then she stands. 

Her stomach growls.

She feels that stab of anxiety every time this happens, that maybe she missed the meals for the day and will have to wait for maybe days, that she should have been putting some aside, saving. She exhales, though, and knows that this isn’t the desert. This isn’t Jakku. There’ll be the mess and if the mess is closed there’s rations in the supply office and even then, there’s fish in the lake. 

She pulls Poe’s blanket off the bed and over her shoulders and tucks it over and under her arms, a makeshift robe. 

She walks out of the room and the barracks and goes off to find Finn or Poe or both.

* * *

Finn’s not really surprised when Rey finds him. He’s out by the lake, sitting out by the water, watching the ripples as birds land and pull fish from the water, as small and strange insects flit along its surface to grab water, maybe to eat even smaller creatures.

She’s got a blanket wrapped around her in a certain way- it has been getting cooler the past few weeks; Finn supposes this world must be approaching its winter-season. It’s a temperate world, unlike Starkiller Base, which was turned to ice by the First Order’s efforts at draining a Sun and Jakku- a whole world a desert. 

“Hello,” she greets, sitting down beside him. 

“Hey,” Finn responds. She lays her head on his shoulder. Her hair is loose from sleep. “You cold?” he asks.

She nods. “I was always inside for the nights,” she says. “And it was cold anyway, but I still don’t like it.”  She shivers slightly and burrows into Finn’s side, thoroughly. “Where’s Poe?” She asks.

“He wanted to make sure you’d sleep so he went to grab something to eat,” he answers. He omits the argument with Master Skywalker- he knows that she already has some doubts, some fears about their relationship, how this might fit into a history with the Jedi.

“Do you think there are flowers here?” She asks.

Finn shrugs. “I don’t see why there wouldn’t be,” he answers. 

Rey nods. 

“Did the mess close?” she asks.

“No,” Finn answers. “And if you check in my bag, I’ve got some fruit in there if you want to grab a piece. We can go that way if you’d like to, anyway.”

“I’d like to,” she says. “But I don’t want to pull you away from here if you don’t want to go.”   
Finn shakes his head. “No,” he says, “I’ve just been thinking. I ran into Master Skywalker earlier and he kind of messed with me.”

Rey frowns, intensely, her features going sharp and strange. “He wasn’t  _ rude _ to you, was he?” She asks. “He was in exile for quite some time and it’s made him  _ strange _ and I can’t have him be rude to you.”   
Finn shakes his head, feeling laughter come out of him. “No,” he says. “No- he wasn’t rude just...unsettling. It’s kind of unbelievable to me, what you’re doing. What you do and what he does. What I saw the force do, it was so... _ ugly _ ,” he says.

He stands and Rey stands with him. They begin to walk, slowly, back toward main base.

“It’s not ugly, what Master Skywalker does,” she says, a little quietly. “Not like what...what _ he  _ does.” There is so much venom in her voice. “But the Force...there is so much power in it. There’s so much  _ there _ . I think he got lost in it and that made him strange and...distant. I think that’s what happened. I don’t know. I spent so much of my life...so alone. I couldn’t imagine that but caught in the...flow of it, the shape of it, and had it just been  _ me _ for so long.”

Finn reaches down and grabs her hand.

She lets him. 

The walk toward base.


	29. Chapter 29

Poe doesn’t mean to find General Organa, but he’s elbow deep in repairs on his ship and he needs a pilot’s wrench and then she’s there, with her own smudges of grease, rooting through the tools.

“Commander,” she greets.

“General,” he answers. 

She moves to the side, to let Poe look. 

“Can I help you find something?” he asks. “I might have it, honestly- there’s a clog in my ventral line that I’m working on and I must have about half the tools out there.”

The General raises an eyebrow. “Lead the way,” she says.

Poe walks over to his ship with her following, the pilot’s wrench in his hand. 

“I thought you were on rest,” she says. “I know for a fact you’re not sleeping as well as you should be.”

“I slept plenty last night,” Poe says. “And Finn needs to rest too and so does Rey so I thought I’d step out rather than just hang around and drive them up the wall. I thought it was a rest day for command, too, General.”

“Don’t,” the General says. “Don’t.”

Something occurs to Poe, suddenly, about the General. 

“General,” he says, “you have been resting, yes? I know you hate it when people do this to you but, you did tell me that we’re not going to win the war on one soldier- you know that applies to you, too?”

“I am a grown woman, Dameron, I know how to take care of myself,” she grumbles. “Worse than Luke.”

“Hand me the socket,” Poe says, and she hefts it into his hand. Poe moves the bolt off of a screw and a panel falls loose. 

“Are you close to him?” He asks. “To Master Skywalker?”

“He doesn’t have you calling him that, do you?” She asks. “Kriff.”

“He doesn’t  _ ask _ us to but...he’s the last  _ Jedi,  _ I don’t know...I guess that requires a certain level of reverence,” he answers.

Poe looks over just soon enough to see her roll her eyes. “He is not the  _ last _ Jedi,” she says. “He’s just been the most  _ obvious _ one for the past twenty years. Our family isn’t good at taking a low profile.”

Poe moves a bucket under the line, which  _ finally _ begins to drain. 

“You didn’t answer the question,” he says, wrinkling his nose at the draining, fouled fluid.

The General sighs. “I think we’re as close as we could be,” she says. “We have lived very different lives- very different childhoods. Other than the blood, the destruction of the Empire was the only thing we really had in common, and for him that was nearly incidental- just this thing that he got pulled into. And after the first half of the war, he was never here much, even when things were good, and then after  _ Ben _ he was never here. He had to start the temple and then after...exile.”

She sits, next to Poe, with a remarkable familiarity. 

“We all hid in what we knew,” she says. “Eventually. Han stayed, for a while. He tried. We tried.”

She sighs, heavily. 

Poe remembers. He is not sure if she knows that he remembers. 

“I’m sorry,” Poe says.

“All those years,” she says. “If I’d asked, he would have come back. Couldn’t do it himself, but if I’d asked, I think Han would have glued Alderaan back together from the dust.”

Poe re-secures the line, sealing it with tape. The General hands him the bolts that keep the securing rings tight. “I didn’t really know him,” Poe says. “I always thought he really seemed to love you, though.  I know that must be small comfort but-”

“I know he loved me,” she says. “I knew it every day. Never doubted it. I think it would have been easier if he loved me less.”

She sighs, again. 

“I can’t talk to Luke about this,” she says. “And I think Threepio is beginning to realize that the diagnostic runs I’m putting him through are just so I can get some  _ peace _ .”   
“Is that what you’re up to?” Poe asks. “The tools?”

The General shakes her head. “Console in center command is on the fritz. Figured that I’d see what’s wrong with it on a rest day rather than when we need all systems up and running.”

“Seems like a good idea to me,” he says, grunting as he secures the panel back into place, pulling his arm out of the body of the engine.

“Take a rest, Dameron,” she says. 

“Yes, General,” he answers picking up the tools.

“Poe,” she calls, as he walks away.

He turns, to see her.

“Don’t waste time,” she says.

“I won’t,” he says. “I’m not. I promise.”

And he dumps the tools back in the kit and he jogs, back toward the mess.

 


	30. Chapter 30

Rey feels Poe walk into the room. She feels him grab a bowl of porridge from the line and she feels him find their table and she feels him approach and then, then he sits down next to her, just a little too close, shoulders brushing hers. 

“You get some sleep?” He asks her. His clothes are spotted and splattered with grease; there’s a huge smear of grease over his forehead , down to his cheek. It restores symmetry to his face against the scar he picked up from being interrogated. His suit’s arms are tied around his waist, leaving his arms (his muscular arms) open to the air, open to be seen. 

Rather than commenting on his wardrobe, though, Rey replies, “Did you?” 

In front of her, Finn rolls his eyes, which for him is a gesture that is not accomplished with just his face but with his whole body, rolling from his eyes through his neck and shoulder. “Am I the only one sleeping right?” he asks. “Seriously? Do I need to talk to Kalonia about  _ both _ of you?”

Finn learned apparently that the Doctor could be an ally to him in making sure she and Poe take care of themselves, and Rey is at once irritated ( _ she’s a grown woman, capable of caring for herself, she did it for nearly fifteen years alone on a desert world) _ and filled with a warm feeling that someone does care. 

“I’m trying,” Poe answers. “I’m trying, I promise.”

She pokes her elbow into Poe’s side, just sharply enough for him to notice, and she sees from the corner of her eye the way he smiles a little, almost to himself.

“I slept well,” she answers. “I wish you had stayed, though. I missed you. Both of you.”

Poe shakes his head, in that way like he can’t quite believe it and Finn flushes all the way up to his cheeks. 

“Well,” Finn says, “with you sleeping, I had to make sure  _ someone _ was taking care of Poe.” He says. 

Rey finds herself laughing. “I found you at the lake by yourself; who was keeping an eye on Poe?”

“I’m older than both of you and I’m right here,” Poe mutters to himself, but there’s no venom to it.

“Poe’s ship was keeping an eye on Poe,” Finn says, shaking his head like he finds Rey’s gripe unbelievable. 

“How old are you?” Rey asks. 

“Thirty-two,” Poe answers. “Give or take some planetary movement and a lot of time in a cockpit- it’s wiggly.” He makes a gesture with his hand, rocking his thumb and fingers in the air back and forth horizontally. 

Rey turns to Finn, who says, “I had been in service of the First Order for fifteen years and had experienced training for seven years prior.”

“So you’re twenty two?” Poe asks.

Finn nods. 

Rey feels her own face heat. 

“Alright,” Poe says, his voice in that teasing tone, light and laughing. “How old are you, Princess?”

“Princess?” Rey asks, laughing. 

“Don’t change the subject,” Finn says, “how old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she says. 

Poe’s eyes go wide, with a kind of shock. “Nine- _ nineteen _ ?” He asks. 

Rey feels herself go hot with embarrassment. “I think so,” she says. “I tried to keep standard time measurement but it was difficult on Jakku and I’m not sure if they have a standard day or not still and when I first got there I wasn’t good at keeping time.”

Poe leans forward and little bit to grab a piece of fish from off of Finn’s plate, and through the action Rey can smell the engine grease on him, the oil in his porridge, the hot sauce he’s poured on it, the grain it is made of, the smell of his soap, the musky smell of  _ him _ . 

His hair is mussed from sleeping and working in the engine; Rey knows that if she reached forward and pushed it around a little, she could see that grey twilight-color underneath. Like the stars left a mark on him. 

His eyes are warm and relaxed. His body is loose but strong. 

Rey feels that  _ warmth _ , that  _ energy _ from before flow through her again, originating from her, burning through her. Pulsing through her. 

She looks over to Finn, who seems to know, who seems able to sense from Rey what she’s feeling, what’s happening. 

“Kriff, I’m ancient next to you both,” he sighs.

“Never,” Finn says back. “You’re distinguished.”

Rey bites her lip and holds her tongue.


	31. Chapter 31

“I felt you,” she says, her voice a slight whisper in the room. “I felt you, the other night, when you were thinking of Finn. Of  _ me. _ ”

Poe turns around. He’s pulling on new clothes, changing out of the oil stained flightsuit, halfway into a shirt. He’s not yet pulled it over his head and and he’s suddenly very aware of his body, bounded by her vision, by her gaze. 

He lets his arms fall and the shirt with it, letting his chest be visible to her. 

He’s been told it’s a good chest before. He knows, objectively, that it’s broad and muscled- it should be with all the weight he lifts doing repairs and going on missions. He also knows it’s got some scars, just one or two from his assorted time in captures. He knows that there’s a certain appeal to that as well. 

He raises an eyebrow. 

“You were quite... _ loud _ ,” she says. 

She sitting on his bed. Her legs are crossed, her spine is straight. She’s pulling her hair out of her buns, her head crooked as she shakes her fingers out of her hair.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he says. “Or...or bother you, I guess. I just...you’re very-”

“Oh,” she says, “I think I have a pretty good idea exactly how you think of me.”

Finn walks into the room, scrubbing his hand over his head, yawning. 

“Finn knows too,” she says, simply. “You made quite an impression on me.”

Poe looks at her, Finn in the background absently puttering, cleaning himself, getting ready for sleep. 

Rey does not look like she is interested in sleeping, and she does not look like she is interested in moving either. 

Poe moves forward, carefully, into her space. 

She does not move her gaze from him. Unwavering. 

Poe sits beside her. 

Looks at her eyes. 

Her mouth.

Her skin.

He feels something on his fingertips, a twitching, a desire. 

An itching to touch. 

He reaches forward, and he moves slowly. He cannot look away from her. 

He lets his hand, slowly, brush through her hair, away from her face. Cup the back of her head, let his hand rest on her neck. Lets the warmth of her fill his hand, let that electric feeling arc from his hand and into her body. Into her.

He leans forward, eyes unmoving. 

She does not move. She does not flinch. Her gaze, it does not waver. It does not shake.

Nothing to her shakes.

He leans forward, and he kisses her.

* * *

 

He’s warmth. 

That’s Rey’s first thought. It’s her only thought. It’s not that it’s heat, it’s that it’s warmth. It’s total warmth. 

It seems to spread from her lips- out of him and into her- from her lips down to her chest, to her shoulders, to her fingertips. It makes her skin feel tight, compacted, and her muscles feel totally loose. 

He pulls away, and it seems to pull her own breath out of her.

She’d seen this gesture before, but never done it herself. No one on Jakku to touch her like this, no one to want to. 

She feels a kind of rattling magnetism through the room. 

“What is that?” Finn asks.

She turns, and Finn is touching his own lips, as if realizing for the first time their potential. Their meaning.

Seeing something he could want. 

Poe’s face loses composition, falls into a loose frown. 

“Have you never- did you never?” He asks.

Finn shakes his head. “Fraternization was punishable with lashes. It still happened, but I never- and I never  _ saw _ . I never did.”

Poe jerks his head to the side, inviting him over. To the bed. With them. 

Poe sits down carefully. Poe in the middle. The bed is so small though, the space between them is nearly nonexistent. 

“This,” Poe says, his voice low and a little soft, “is  _ kissing _ .”

He does not reach out like he did with her, but he does lean, and he does kiss Finn, whose eyes close with a slow reverence.

It makes her think of the way Master Skywalker’s own eyes close when he meditates. Of something sacred. 

“Oh,” Finn says, breaking away. The word is exhaled.

He surges forward, his hands finding Poe, finding his face and his hair and his skin and his body. 

They kiss. They kiss.

They kiss, and Rey wants more. 

She craves more. 

She must have more.

She leans in and lays her chest against Poe’s shoulder. She drapes her leg across his lap, she tugs him, away from Finn and to herself, pulls along his jaw so that he faces her. 

He opens his mouth, against hers. His tongue, it pokes forward, it probes forward, lapping against her own lips. He breaks and returns, loose and soft. Rey opens her own mouth, and Poe’s tongue licks forward, soft. 

Rey can’t breathe, and yet breath is all she is. Breath, and nerves.

“Here,” he says, pulling Finn forward over himself, to her and she looks at him (Finn who is kindness, Finn whose eyes are bright and starred and playful, Finn who who is beautiful in dark skin and full lips and a bright, full smile, so full) and he reaches and she reaches, and they are together.

Finn is less experienced than Poe, tense where Poe is relaxed, over-eager where Poe is langorous, but Rey  _ wants _ . She demands. She loves how smooth his skin feels under her hands, how his own inexperience beside her mirrors her own. 

Where Poe feels like the flow of a river, Finn feels like electricity sparking under her.

And then she feel’s Poe’s mouth resting and moving and sucking over and along her clavicle. 

This is not heat. This is not the scorching agony of Jakku.

This is warmth- a pool of blood, a radiating coal, the heat left from an engine- an aliveness. 

Rey gasps against Finn, arcs into Poe. 


	32. Chapter 32

Poe is kissing Rey’s neck and Finn is kissing her mouth- they’re kissing each other. 

Poe loves this. He loves touching her, he loves being beside her, he loves feeling with his mouth, the shape of her bones, of her skin. Her.

Poe keeps his eyes closed, keeps himself blind. 

He craves them.

He reaches outward, to grab Finn’s hand, finds his arm and lets his hand wander downward to find his wrist, to find his hand. Tugs Finn’s hand to his chest, still bare, and Finn seems to get on board, to realize that he can touch him; he can touch Poe and touch Rey and Rey can touch both of them too; they can be a circuit, a unit, feeding back on itself.

Rey makes a small, soft noise, a gasp, a moan, her voice high and free.

Free.

It occurs to Poe that he wants to make them both free.

* * *

 

Rey’s not sure when they all wind up lying down. She’s not quite sure how she got her leg  _ there _ or Finn’s arm  _ here _ , but they’re tangled in each other. The lights are off- she’s not sure how they got that way either, and she’ not sure when or how the blanket wound up draped over them. 

The tip of Poe’s nose is cold where he shakes his head, nuzzles against her neck, 

Finn’s hands are warm and heavy over her belly, under her neck. 

As she falls back asleep, she can hear Poe’s voice say softly, “I love you like I love flying. I love you because you make me feel free.”

Rey lets that sit warmly in her ear, in her mind, in her soul.

Beside her, Finn answers, “I know.”

Rey sighs, happily. 

Drifts slowly to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> (I really enjoyed writing this! I hope to write more Poe/Finn/Rey soon!)


End file.
